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www.openthemagazine.com 32 november 2020

contents2 november 2020

12

THe InSIDer By PR Ramesh

18

OPINIONLeft, right and

nowhereBy Minhaz Merchant

20

WHISPERERBy Jayanta Ghosal

Cover by Saurabh Singh

56

52

16

HoW ILL Is InDIA’s HeALtH sectoR?With government hospitals overburdened, bottomlines of private ones wiped out, and an insurance system that seems to be unable to wrap its head around the pandemic, Covid-19 has laid bare India’s health infrastructureBy Lhendup G Bhutia

Be PAtIentBeing non-Covid patients in the time of a pandemicBy Nikita Doval

DoctoRs JUMPInG BoRDeRsWith the disruption in corporate hospitals, underpaid medical professionals and neighbourhood nursing homes are stepping into the breachBy V Shoba

PUNJABI RAPPolitical brinkmanship in Punjab has taken a dangerous turn after the farm reform laws By Siddharth Singh

LETTER FROM LAHORELand without small mercies By Mehr Tarar

28

34

38

44

48

16

ToUCHSToneAn American

folk taleBy Keerthik Sasidharan

14

InDIAn ACCenTSReimagining

the GitaBy Bibek Debroy

52

beHoLDen To THe FATHer FIGUre

Sofia Coppola on her departure from reflective character studies

By Rajeev Masand

56

‘THe TIDe IS SHIFTInG AWAY From mALe SUPremACY’

Parvathy on the Kerala film industryBy Ullekh NP

60

THe InvISIbLe oTHerWhat makes us who we are?

Increasingly in popular culture it is who we are opposed to

By Kaveree Bamzai

65

HoLLYWooD rePorTerEwan McGregor on his

new docu-series Long Way UpBy Noel de Souza

66

noT PeoPLe LIKe USA new beginning

By Rajeev Masand

5

LoComoTIFThe trial

then and nowBy S Prasannarajan

6

oPen DIArYBy Swapan Dasgupta

28

22

OPEN ESSAYMao against

NehruBy Iqbal Chand Malhotra

5

22

2 november 20204

waiting for deathMuch as we may yearn ‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain’, we may not really end up being fortunate enough when our turn comes (‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Arun Shourie, October 26th, 2020). Yama’s emissaries are not known to be kind nor do they come sequentially. So probably, we should remember the maxim that ‘preparedness is all’. Truly, being organised in death, as in life, is crucial to a peaceful end. Writing a will can indeed be liberating because it gives us a glimpse of our own end. Once we have our after-plan ready, we can, like passengers in a lounge, soak in the moment.

Sangeeta Kampani

editor@openmedianetwork.in

tamil twistThe B JP has finally got a face to activate its cadre in Tamil Nadu for the electoral race (‘Getting It Right’ by By Maalan Narayanan, October 26th, 2020). The party’s plans to rope in Rajinikanth has not yielded any results as the actor chose to float his own party. Khushbu Sundar who could not shake the Congress much may be better placed in the BJP because the former party is in a shambles in the state. The BJP doesn’t have any history there and may strike a chord with the voters who are fed up of AIADMK’s and DMK’s shenanigans.Though Khushbu is no Jayalalithaa, she is no Sasikala either. She has a clean track record and

with the right backing of the BJP’s leaders, she could be the much needed alternative in Tamil Nadu politics. If the BJP doesn’t get it right this time, it will be a longwinding road ahead for them. With the current EPS adminstration’s poor performance and DMK’s MK Stalin, Kamal Haasan and Rajini still struggling to become relevant, Khushbu could be the real alternative Tamil voters are looking for. It’s now or never.

Ashok Goswami

Switching parties is a way of life in Tamil Nadu politics and actor Kushbu Sundar has perfected the art by now. She has had a lacklustre career in both the DMK and the Congress. Now, the BJP’s arrival on the Tamil scene has given her new opening and a third chance to turn into reality the part she has been dreaming of. Let us wait and watch how the BJP fares in the next Tamil Nadu elections and whether it is able to grow beyond elections. Whoever wins, party-hopper Kushbu is having a field day trying her political luck out again and again.

CK Jayanthimaniam

C letter of the week

Despite opposition parties being in disarray and Rashtriya Janata Dal founder Lalu Prasad serving

a prison term for a multi-crore fodder scam, the electoral fight in Bihar that looked like a onesided

affair at the beginning for the BJP-Janata Dal (United) combine has become tough as we near the voting dates

(‘Bihar 2020’, October 26th, 2020). The main reason is the poor performance of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar

over the past five years. If you look at the questions in the latest opinion survey also, you will see that

while people still prefer him to anyone else, they are also complaining about him individually, not the

coalition. That should give the BJP some hope. Nitish Kumar rose in Bihar politics as a whiff of fresh air

and promised to transform the state but got waylaid in between. He made prohibition his main plank

but that has not helped grow the economy of Bihar. Instead, the Bihar government is losing revenue to

both neighbouring states and smugglers. The LJP, the Congress and the RJD are full of discredited leaders. Nitish Kumar has become a shadow of himself and

his agenda of growth and development seems to have taken a backseat. It’s a sorry state of affairs where no

matter who wins—Lalu’s son Tejashwi or Nitish once again—Bihar ends up losing.

Bholey Bhardwaj

open mail

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volume 12 issue 43for the week 27 october- 2 november 2020total no. of pages 68

disclaimer‘open avenues’ are advertiser-driven marketing initiatives and Open assumes no responsibility for content and the consequences of using products or services advertised in the magazine

www.openthemagazine.com 52 november 2020

efore 2020, there was 1968. then: the streets erupted in counter-cultural romance of what Le Monde called the “bored” generation. In Paris, they occupied universities and factories and invited Sartre for philosophical input—and old icons of communism

were worthy of being there on the wall and the placard. that was a time when capitalism and imperialism were synonyms for evil, a time when the guardian of Gallic essentialism, Charles de Gaulle, had to temporarily flee the republic. In the religion of protest, conscience conditioned by ideology was the only temple.

elsewhere, in the United States, it was a war and an assassination that brought dissent to the street. Vietnam was the wrong war for a generation angered by the extra-territorial terror of the imperium, and the foot soldiers dying in the faraway swamps and jungles of Vietnam mostly came from the working class and the Black community. the war was not unsolicited martyrdom; it was sacrifice to please the wrong god. then riots broke out after the assassination of rev Martin Luther King Jr. the republican candidate richard Nixon campaigned on the platform of law and order—and would win. And at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the “rioters” included hippies, pacifists and ideologues. one year later, in the beginning of the Nixon era, their ordeal would come to be known as the trial of the Chicago 7—the drama of youthful dissent and insensitive state staged in the backdrop of a culture war.

When you watch Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, streaming on Netflix, in 2020, five decades after 1968, the distance in time is reduced by the mythology of protest, its morals and methods. the culture war is back, with the progressives in righteous rage set against the state without justice. then it was the assassination of King that set the street on fire; in 2020 it was the death of George floyd under the knee of a white policeman. then it was Nixon who extolled the virtues of the strong state (“We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame”); today there is a Donald trump, seeking re-election on law and order, to pull the presidential trigger, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” the cultural divide was as sharp then as it is today, with the dictatorship of correctness enforcing its own taboos in public discourse. The Trial of the Chicago 7 should be watched as a memorial service and a moral rejoinder, which is also an explicit directorial demand.

And the director being Aaron

Sorkin, a courtroom drama becomes a verbal arena where the kinetic force of dialogues is matched by the moralism of the self-conscious idealist. As a scriptwriter and filmmaker (the repertoire includes The West Wing, The Newsroom and The Social Network), he is the polemicist of here-and-now, carrying within him an overabundance of headlines-driven rage. In The Trial, the dramatisation of moral crime and predetermined punishment parades the idealists, bigots and conspirators from the year that America believes it’s reliving today.

here they are. the hippies, Abbie hoffman and Jerry rubin, played with comic irreverence by Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong (of Succession) respectively, come to the court one day dressed as judges, and hoffman never misses an opportunity to defy the system with some of Sorkin’s best lines. tom hayden (eddie redmayne), the ideologue, is a conflicted soul waiting for validation. he will have his moment, even if it’s at the expense of historical fact. rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John froines, and Lee Weiner complete the list of rebels accused of being the rioters of ’68. for a while they are joined by the Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), without legal representation. When he stands up for his rights, he is gagged and chained to his seat, and the scene provides the film’s most eloquent reminder that racial dehumanisation is a constant in America’s trials. the defence attorney William Kunstler (Mark rylance) argues with stoic restraint, and he is constantly undercut by the federal judge Julius hoffman, a looming tower of conservative partisanship and a ruthless wielder of contempt-of-court order, brilliantly played by frank Langella.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the judgment was custom-made for Nixon’s “spoiled rotten”. It doesn’t matter whether the seven would be acquitted by a higher court. It also doesn’t matter whether we all along knew that the riot was instigated not by the seven but the cops who put their badges inside their pockets before charging. What we are meant to know is that The Trial of the Chicago 7, even if we shuffle the text and context, retains its message in the age of angry streets and a president worse than Nixon. We are meant to remember that our conscience is still on trial in a world where the lies of the state continue to borrow from history.

the post-credits question is: What does it take for a filmmaker or a writer to let polemics and pedagogy diminish his art for the sake of social, cultural and ideological obligations? n

B

LOCOMOTIF

by S PRASANNARAJAN

THE TRIAL THEN AND NOW

The Trial of the Chicago 7

2 november 20206

For a Few days or maybe a week at most, a large section of

the social media behaved as if the most important thing in India—after Covid—was an advertisement issued by the makers of Tanishq jewel-lery. There were spirited exchanges between those who described the ad-vertisement as a sensitive portrayal of the togetherness of India and those who believed—equally sincerely— that, behind the touching portrayal of multi-religious accommodation, this was nothing but a justification of ‘love jihad’. The furore was signifi-cant enough for the Tata company to withdraw the advertisement and the share price of the company took a hit as a boycott campaign was launched by those who were outraged.

what is striking is that the opinions on the Tanishq advertise-ment differed significantly according to class. For much of upper-middle class, cosmopolitan India, there was nothing strange about a Muslim boy marrying a Hindu girl and his family accommodating the girl’s customs as much as possible. In our social life, we know of many inter-faith marriages where there is no question of conver-sion. The more complex question of what faith the children should fol-low—if they are not to be atheists—is, of course, left unaddressed.

slightly lower down the social ladder, ‘love jihad’ is a touchy issue. There is, in any case, an innate conservatism of families that fear the free social interaction of the sexes. on top of that, the bush telegraph suggests that Muslim boys are somehow adept at enticing Hindu girls into a relationship and then securing their conversion to Islam. The fear is always centred on the intentions of Muslim boys. The question of Hindu boys striking up a

relationship with Muslim girls is again left unaddressed. anyway, this section strongly felt that the portrayal of Muslim open-mindedness was an eyewash and that as far as their experience suggested, the Muslim community was never going to accept multiplicity of faith. They will point to the horrible predica-ment of Hindu and sikh minorities in Pakistan and the familiar tales of conversions to Islam.

In a facile article that seems to be the hallmark of the foreign media in India, it was suggested in Financial Times that this intolerance is a feature of post-2014 India and that Narendra Modi’s victories have narrowed the Hindu mind. This is complete hogwash. I recall in my youth being told by kindly relatives that we could marry anyone suit-able, but never a Muslim. despite the shuddhi Movement of the arya samaj in the late-19th century, most Hindus didn’t factor in the possi-bilities of conversions to Hinduism. Conversion was always regarded as a one-way street—from the Hindu faith to Islam. This was seen to be as true for Hindu boys who married Muslim girls as it was for Hindu girls wedding Muslim men.

It is for historians and sociologists to provide credible explanations of what lay behind such attitudes. However, before the faultlines are

debunked under the all-embracing category ‘prejudice’, it is worth reflecting on what creates prejudice. I am often reminded of why edmund Burke, often described as the archi-tect of modern conservatism, never considered prejudice to be a pejora-tive term. To Burke, prejudice was invariably the outcome of accumu-lated experiences which have been passed down the generations. To him, prejudice was always based on uncodified knowledge. Being devoid of prejudice involves being socialised in a very different ecosystem—a rea-son why cosmopolitan India saw the Tanishq advertisement in a different light from Middle India.

However, there are exceptions. My grandfather’s sister was a feisty lady. she secured a doctorate from Heidelberg in the 1930s, became a trade unionist on her return and earned considerable fame—and notoriety—as the leader of sweepers employed by the Calcutta Corpora-tion. within the family she was regarded with both awe and dread.

My grandaunt did something that was unusual, even by her eccentric standards: she married a Muslim. If she was a battle axe, Mirza sahib—as he was known in the family—was quite the opposite. a refined, highly educated scion of a Hyderabad family, he was soft-spoken and well liked by everyone. He had a distin-guished career as a diplomat and a politician. There was no question of my grandaunt changing her religion. Indeed, after marriage, she gave up activism and became a devout Kali worshipper, doing puja each day in a flaming red sari.

Her life didn’t reshape the notion of prejudice in our family. But we adored Mirza sahib and regarded my grandaunt as totally bonkers. n

Swapan Dasguptaopen diary

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thought stimulant

2 november 20208

On Monday, october 19th, in a not alto-gether unanticipated decision, the Indian defence establishment abandoned its self-restraint, or rather self-imposed restraint, to invite australia to the 2020

Malabar exercises with itself, the US and Japan. the absence of surprise didn’t entail a lack of optimism, or even euphoria in some quarters. In the mix of the tangible and the symbolic, the latter usually has the first say and australia’s ‘return’ to the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) is as symbolic as it reconfigures the Quad’s raison d’être. Malabar, of course, is not held under the auspices of the Quad but the forum can finally live up to its name. and it was now or never.

the Quad had disintegrated in 2008 when Kevin rudd’s Labor administration had pulled australia out and enthusiasm had waned in both Japan—with Shinzo abe, whose brainchild it had been, leaving office in September 2007—and India—where the UPa Government, with its overcautious defence minister, bent over backwards to stay out of china’s way. In the years that followed, two, not unrelated, geopolitical develop-ments had progressed simultaneously. china’s continued economic rise with the attendant, now overtly prioritised, military modernisation and the growing defence and strategic closeness between new delhi and Washington.

the fear of an angry china had afflicted not merely South block. china had protested vehemently when the double Malabar of 2007 had expanded to include australia and Singapore. In the end, the chinese had won both ways. rory Medcalf, strategic expert and head of national Secu-rity college at the australian na-tional University, recently wrote in Australian Foreign Affairs: ‘the main criticism of the Quad back then was that it would needlessly provoke china down a perilous path of military modernisation and destabilising behaviour. yet beijing chose such a road anyway. the perils the Quad’s critics thought it would invoke ended up arising in its absence (emphasis

added). the next decade brought such geopolitical instability that the four governments became convinced their disbanded dialogue had been an idea ahead of its time.’

In the autumn of 2020 going on winter, china has risen from the beating it initially took over the pandemic to revel in military aggression and aggressive posturing brazen by even the People’s republic’s (Prc) standards since the time of the chairman. after the summer of bloodshed in the himalayas with the Indian military, President Xi Jinping has given a call for war-readiness to the People’s Liberation army (PLa) and reportedly the Prc is seri-ously planning an invasion of taiwan, or at least that’s the mes-sage it’s intent on conveying. In a retaliatory diplomatic measure following up on the dragged-out but still unfinished trade war, the US has appointed a special coordinator for tibetan issues. the irony of the situation is that, having evidently got several things wrong at home and abroad, the trump administration got two things obviously right—china and the Quad—among certain other things it most likely got right in foreign policy and geopolitics. (It’s more than just a joke that covid-19, originating in Wuhan and then damaging donald trump, the first US Presi-dent to put real roadblocks on beijing’s long and quick march to global supremacy, has been a windfall for the Party.)

It was the trump administration that in 2017 had helped begin the resurrection of the Quad. this had perfectly dove-

tailed with new delhi, with a new Government in office, by then having realised that staying out of beijing’s way only embold-ened the Prc and made it take you for granted. rather, greater proximity to Washington would squeeze beijing at one end and make it more amenable to dia-logue at the other. It worked to an extent where china went into a mode of alternating between dismissing the US-India partner-ship and raising its protest pitch. all the time, the border face-offs went on as did china’s continued efforts to block India from export control regimes like the nuclear Suppliers Group. by the time an

openingsThe Return of the Quad

NOTEBOOK

Australia rejoins Malabar and Delhi, by rights, will practise its

minilateralism within and without the Quad. But

sometime in the near future, it may want to note that alliances are not commitments till death

do nations part. They are also functional tools to

realise mutual goals with likeminded partners

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 9

angry India, in the fall of 2020, invited australia to Malabar, the die had been cast. the catalyst was the second ministerial meet of the Quad in tokyo earlier this month—a face-to-face, physi-cal meeting despite the pandemic—where mutual interest and intent converged with all eyes on the clock.

Medcalf tells Open: “It was worth the wait. australia’s inclusion in the 2020 Malabar naval exercise is a confirma-tion of the logic of practical Indo-Pacific security cooperation centred on the Quad. For many years now it has been clear that these four countries offer an exceptional convergence of strategic interests, competent capabilities, mutual respect for a rules-based order and willingness to work together. china and its affronts to regional order provided the final glue, making manifest the pre-existing alignment of interest among the four.” as neatly as that sums up the resurrection of the Quad, what has changed in delhi can’t be reduced to the post-Galwan heat. the message, despite attempts to mute it, is quite clear: India’s counter-aggression vis-à-vis china now officially spans land and sea, from Ladakh to the Indo-Pacific, notwithstanding delhi’s communiqué that the Quad should not be conflated with the Indo-Pacific. the truth, or what one hopes is the truth, should be that the immediate end here is cutting off the Straits of Malacca from the PLa navy whenever the need arises.

each of the four members of the Quad is in beijing’s crosshairs. but the fact is that the Quad is not the only strategic forum of its kind in the Indo-Pacific. While the idea was to ex-pand it to include the UK and France—an idea that may yet see the light of day given Japan’s permanent membership in Mala-bar since 2015 and now australia’s return—there are already at least two trilaterals that have surfaced in the region: a for-malised broad-issue forum involving India, australia and Indo-

nesia and a less formalised maritime exercise and exploration trilateral among India, australia and France. as Medcalf points out, there’s also the ‘less famous quadrilateral’ of australia, new Zealand, the US and France in the South Pacific. the Quad, in fact, may now scale things up and broaden its horizons, taking a leaf out of the South Pacific diplomatic quadrilateral’s book. Medcalf says: “after this, the Quad won’t look back, and we are likely to see collaboration broaden across other domains like supply-chain resilience, cyber security and coordination of diplomatic efforts in multilateral organisations.”

the question, for the others though, would inevitably return to India. Soon after the announcement on october 19th, abc journalist Siobhan heanue tweeted: ‘australia joining ex Malabar is significant - but it is India that will make or break the Quad.’ delhi has been more driven and seemingly determined than ever in reviving the Quad but it apparently remains the weak link. Japan and australia are both alliance partners of the US. India is not likely to be one in the foresee-able future, especially given the persistence of apathy towards the idea of big-time alliances in South block. delhi, by rights, will practise its minilateralism within and without the Quad but sometime in the near future it may want to sit up and note that alliances are not commitments till death do nations part. they are also functional tools to realise mutual goals with likeminded parties. china has forged and broken alliances with one and all, often based on single, extremely short-term objectives. From where delhi looks at the world, it will not find ‘big’ countries, with a stake in its maritime neighbourhood, more likeminded than its three partners in the Quad. n

By sudeep paul

I l lustration by SauraBh SiNgh

2 november 2020

openings

For fans of Tamil cinema, the name Prem evokes not a salman Khan character, but the 2012 film Naduvula Konjam Pakkatha Kaanum,

in which the lead played by actor Vijay sethupathi loses his memory after sustaining a small injury playing cricket with his friends. “I tripped and fell. I got hurt here... that is where the medulla oblongata is. The shock must have resulted in short-term memory loss. It’s ok, it will come back on its own,” Prem assures himself, in words that every fan of the actor has committed to memory. sethupathi, 42, would have played cricket again onscreen, por-traying one of the greatest cricketers of all time, sri Lankan offspin legend Muttiah Muralitharan. Cast in a biopic named 800—after the number of Test wickets Muralitharan has to his name—sethupathi had announced the project in early october, only to be browbeaten into withdrawing from it within a couple of weeks. The opposition came from a section of Tamil society that feels betrayed by Muralitharan’s politics. a Tamil who grew up in sri Lanka during the civil war, Muralitharan is accused of disclaim-ing his ancestry and siding with the Mahinda rajapaksa government that oversaw the genocide of Tamils in the country. “Muralitharan is an example for achievers in cricket and a historically important figure. But his political posturing and alleged identity swaps are controversial and cannot escape a portrayal in his biopic,” says Maravanpulavu K sachithananthan, a Hindu Tamil activist in sri Lanka. as detractors took to social media and urged the star to back out of the project, sensible voices condemned the slurs and a rape threat directed at his daughter. The backlash finally prompted Muralithar-an, who is coaching bowlers of sunrisers Hyderabad for the Indian Premier

League season underway in the UaE, to issue a statement asking the actor to quit for the sake of his own safety and image.

“When I spoke to him, sethupathi seemed unaware of the political purposes that a biopic on a problematic figure like Muralitharan could serve,” says V Gowthaman, a Chennai-based filmmaker, pro-Tamil activist and politician. “We have nothing against a film on Muralitharan. But it is being made in Tamil, with one of the most loved stars of Tamil cinema playing the character. It cannot be seen as just art—if the film comes out and sethupathi becomes a tool in the hands of an anti-Tamil establishment to promote a hero who toes their line, it will hurt Tamil sentiment no end,” he says. Muralitharan has put out statements clarifying that the film is intended to inspire a generation of upcoming cricketers. He has also claimed affiliation with the Tamil plantation workers in sri Lanka and said that his father and relatives lost their lives to the ethnic conflict. “The Tamil identity issue still rages in sri Lanka, and an actor of sethupathi’s stature should not be seen to endorse a man who has never before empathised with his own people,” Gowthaman says.

The sobriquet of ‘Makkal selvan’ (People’s Man) has stuck to sethupathi since director seenu ramasamy popularised it ahead of the release of his film Dharma Durai (2016). a rare actor in Tamil cinema who trespassed several boundaries, including the one between the commercial and the indie worlds, Vijay sethupathi had a late start—after a career as an accountant in Dubai—and one that coincided with a new wave in the industry. Character-centric films, like the crime comedy Soodhu Kavvum (2013), the nostalgia trip that was 96 (2018) and Super Deluxe (2019) where he plays a transgender, made him a darling of Tamil audiences.

sethupathi has, on occasion, spoken up against communal tension, fan wars and the abrogation of article 370. In an interview last year to SBS Tamil Australia, a radio channel, after winning the best actor award at the Indian film festival in Melbourne, he invoked Dravidian leader Periyar EV ramasamy and criticised the narendra Modi Government’s “anti-democratic” stand on Kashmir. His statements on the issue are rumoured to have come in the way of his bagging the Tamil nadu Government’s Kalaimamani award for excellence in art and literature.

Bowing out of 800, which could have won him an oscar nomination, is a personal setback for sethupathi the artist, but it has only reaffirmed his stature as the conscience-keeper of Tamil cinema. n

By V shoBa

bowled outThe Tamil star is browbeaten into withdrawing from a biopic on cricketer Muralitharan

portrait vijay Sethupathi

Courtesy KarthiK SrinivaSan

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 11

‘The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little’ Franklin D rooseveltformer us president

Word’S Worth

progreSSPope francis endorsing same-sex marriages has to be a dramatic moment for the Catholic Church, but it is also an inevitable one because that is the nature of civilisation’s progress. outdated values that seem ossified in stone in institutions find it difficult to withstand the self-evident ideas being accepted in the rest of the world. The present Pope, who was always known to be a liberal, was preceded by a hardliner. sustainable progress builds up gradually until it becomes conventional wisdom abruptly. Think of the sun going around the earth, a belief which the Church held for centuries. n

ideaS

ge

tt

y i

ma

ge

S

angLe

SoMETHInG so PoWErfUL that it controls access to your

consciousness itself, which knows more about you than you yourself, and can predict decisions that you are going to make even before it has crossed your mind, must be allowed into society with extreme caution. But the tech-nology and the companies that wield them came in almost without notice, making it seem as just a natural pro-gression of entrepreneurship. It clearly wasn’t. We see the signs of it all around, from appliances that hear every word you say to posts targeted so minutely to individuals that it can veer you to vote for a certain candidate in elections. online technology has encroached into areas no one predicted and yet the companies that own it don’t nearly get challenged enough about the power they wield. That might end by the Us government’s actions this week.

They filed an antitrust lawsuit that could potentially lead to Google being broken up because of, it said, too much influence that was used to prevent competition. as Reuters reported, ‘The U.s. sued Google on Tuesday, accusing the $1 trillion company of illegally us-ing its market muscle to hobble rivals in the biggest challenge to the power and influence of Big Tech in decades. The Justice Department lawsuit could lead to the break-up of an iconic company that has become all but synonymous with the internet and assumed a central role in the day-to-day lives of billions of people around the globe.’ Effectively, as a search engine, Google is a monopoly and the money it makes from that posi-

tion, makes it perpetuate the monopoly. While the case will take time for a verdict, should the government suc-ceed, the spillover to the other big tech companies is inevitable. social media, which defines modern existence, too might eventually get out of the strangle-hold of a handful of companies that exert extraordinary control over a large swathe of mankind.

There are no answers to what the alternative world will look like but the present everyone recognises is a calamity in progression. former Google CEo Eric schmidt who came in an online event of Wall Street Journal recently, said that they had not foreseen or intended ‘social net-works serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people…Unless the industry gets its act together in a really clever way, there will be regulation.’ But what did they intend then? To make vast profits by cap-turing attention at a scale never known before while ignoring secondary effects. It was through Google’s search engine money that they bought YouTube, the company’s social media cash cow.

now when the consequences are be-coming real, these companies are trying to plug holes in the Titanic with paper. spelt out in schmidt’s statement is also the next danger that these companies pose. once Google decides who are the ‘idiots and crazy people’, then anyone who does not meet their standard is essentially an outcaste in the neighbour-hood. and such powers and their abuse are limitless in scope. regulation might be bad for entrepreneurship but mo-nopolies that have appropriated godlike powers onto themselves are worse. n

The US government’s attempt signals recognition of the dangers of tech monopolies

By madhaVankutty pillai

Breaking Up google

2 november 202012

the insiderPR Ramesh

Chirag Paswan, who took over as Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief

after the death of his father Ram Vilas Paswan, might have chosen the over-the-top option of letting his audience see how dear he held Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his heart. Even as Chirag dropped out of the NDA in Bihar and chose to contest alone, vowing to oust Nitish Kumar and ring in a BJP chief minister, the BJP’s leadership—which launched a multi-pronged attack on him in both Delhi and Patna recently—is actually livid with him for the decision to walk out of the alliance. For sure, some blame Nitish and his refusal to share power and responsibility for Chirag’s decision.

But the BJP leadership believes that in offering 15 seats to the LJP and in suggesting that the Janata Dal-United, or JD(U), share 10 other seats with the LJP—a suggestion Nitish outright rejected—it did Chirag more than a favour. Consequently, it disapproves of what it sees as tantrums from the LJP leader, who is considered callow and politically untested by several people in the JD(U). Against this backdrop, a comfortable victory for the NDA in Bihar could mean curtains for Chirag Paswan. His party’s following could

well be up for grabs too. A big loss could also be prime real estate in New Delhi where Ram Vilas Paswan had

occupied a spacious residence on Janpath for years as

minister under various dispensations. The LJP,

which suffered a big dip in popularity among

its Dalit vote base with the advent of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), has been on the decline since 2005. In 2005, it won 10 Assembly seats. In 2010, that came down to three. And in 2015, the number plunged to two. Even Ram Vilas Paswan, known as an astute leader who understood which way the wind was blowing to effect a seamless switch, openly acknowledged that he could not become a political force in the state on the strength of just votes from the Paswan community. It was this that had dictated his support for the Mandal Commission report as well as other political somersaults in his career. This year’s Bihar election could prove to be the biggest risk the LJP leadership has taken in its existence—especially if voters, notwithstanding Chirag’s claims of loyalty to Narendra Modi, decide to vote directly for Modi’s candidates and his closest allies instead.

This seems to be the season of books on the history of

India’s economic reforms. Often, it’s about conflicting versions of that history—and equally conflicting versions of ownership of key proposals in the 1992 Union Budget. A book by Isher Judge Ahluwalia, former Chairperson of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) who died recently, has rekindled interest in the subject as well as turned the spotlight on what went on backstage. Her husband, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, then Finance Secretary and the most important public policy official on economic reforms in the Manmohan Singh regime, also

released a book—Backstage: The Story behind India’s High Growth Years—recently on the period of key economic reforms. For many of the books on those years, Manmohan Singh, the crucial driver of the reforms, becomes a footnote or is pushed to the margins while the writer himself becomes the protagonist. Now, some of that self-trumpeting is not going uncontested, even the more articulate versions. Arvind Virmani, a close associate of Montek, has now

come out in the open with his version of what went on backstage in the key reform years. He maintains: “The 1992 Budget speech included the Dual Exchange Rate proposal

that I formulated and gave to the DEA Secretary Montek Ahluwalia in a 10-page note. The note was then sent to the RBI, which worked out the operational details. The final version was worked out in the home of RBI Governor Venkitaramanan, with me and

Joint Secretary YV Reddy representing the [Ministry of Finance].” Voila!

The Real RefoRmeR

ChiRag’s Way

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 13

Expenditure Secretary TV Somanathan may not have

been a well-known name earlier, but since end-2019—after the 1987 batch officer from the IAS’ Tamil Nadu cadre was appointed to his current post in the finance ministry—his star has been ascending. In March 2015, Somanathan was appointed Joint Secretary in the PMO. Before that, he was Commercial Taxes Commissioner and Principal Secretary in the Tamil Nadu government. When he was raised to expenditure secretary in December

last year, the post had been vacant after the appointment of GC Murmu as the first Lieutenant Governor of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. On October 29th, Murmu relinquished the post of expenditure secretary and Atanu Chakraborty, a 1985 batch IAS officer, was given the additional charge. Somanathan

was awarded the gold medal for the best IAS trainee in his batch and has a PhD in economics from the University of Calcutta. A trained chartered accountant (CA), this bureaucrat’s inimitable talents—including those of a CA, CMA and chartered secretary—

apparently carry a lot of weight in policy formulations. The good news is that he has five years left in service and is tipped to scale greater heights.

‘India’s Turning Point: An Economic Agenda to Spur

Growth and Jobs’ was a report from the McKinsey Global Institute released in August this year. The widely read document bats heavily for a reform agenda in the next 12-18 months to accommodate 9 crore more workers in non-farm sectors by 2030, especially in the thick of policy decisions that lead to high growth in the manufacturing and construction sectors. In 2017, there was ‘India’s Labour Market: A New Emphasis on Gainful Employment’. McKinsey became the most favoured agency for many establishments. Its policy perspectives became the core ideology for many businesses to ‘rationalise’ their workforce over the years. Thus buoyed, the agency drafted its newsletter to advise on pruning and redeploying staff in major organisations in the capital. The man McKinsey tasked with the job is now wreaking havoc on the job market and being blamed for largescale retrenchments.

sCaling The heighTs

WReCking Ball

The Congress rebel in Rajasthan, Sachin Pilot, and Ghulam Nabi

Azad, Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha, have both been added to the list of star campaigners for the Bihar Assembly elections along with party chief Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. Azad was among the 23 dissenters who wrote to Sonia Gandhi earlier, demanding a complete overhaul of the party’s organisational structure. Pilot revolted against Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot. The move to include these two in the campaign A-list of 30 is, therefore, seen more as a symbolic act of mollifying them. With the three heavyweights of the Congress’ first family featured high on the list, Azad

seems destined to linger near the margins. That the old timer, among others, had already been relegated to the sidelines was evident when the party tasks performed earlier by him were handed over to lightweights such as KC Venugopal. That shift was evident in the last Parliament session when men known to punch much above their political weight were assigned the task of handling the Congress’ parliamentary group in the Upper House. They were at the forefront of leading loud protests in the well of the House. And the leaders who orchestrated these unseemly theatrics now seem to be eyeing the opposition leader’s post that will become vacant when Azad retires early next year.

sTaR CampaigneRs

2 november 202014

W hat is a ‘Gita’? i have been writing about Gitas in the Mahabharata. But whether it is Gitas in the Mahabharata or in other texts, that question can’t be answered

satisfactorily. ‘Gita’ simply means something that was sung. it may certainly be the case that the Bhagavat Gita was the first such Gita. it is certainly the case that the Bhagavat Gita is the most important of these Gitas. Nevertheless, one should be aware that there are other such Gitas. there is a website that has sanskrit documents. it has a listing of such other Gitas and their texts. that lists 55 Gita texts. there are a couple more on the Gita supersite maintained by iit Kanpur. that means, the Gita corpus has around 60 texts. One might argue that, to be called a Gita, a text has to be explicitly described as a ‘Gita’. there is a problem with this argument. those descriptions will typically be in the chapter heading, or in the colophon added at the end of a chapter or text. But the vintage of these chapter headings and colophons is later. there is no means of knowing whether they were part of the original text.

Let me stick to the Mahabharata and let me stick to the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata, published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research institute (BORi) in Pune. From 1916 to 1966, the BORi sifted through more than 1,200 versions of the sanskrit Mahabharata and produced what is inferred to be the closest to the original text. this text is known as BORi’s Critical Edition. Nothing can be established with certainty and hence there is subjectivity in inferring. some critiques have criticised BORi, both on grounds of omission and commission, though more the former. today, the Mahabharata text is divided into 18 parvas. they are not even in size and their names are 1) ‘adi Parva’ 2) ‘sabha Parva’ 3) ‘aranyaka (Vana) Parva’ 4) ‘Virata Parva’ 5) ‘Udyoga Parva’ 6) ‘Bhishma Parva’ 7) ‘Drona Parva’ 8) ‘Karna Parva’ 9) ‘shalya Parva’ 10) ‘souptika Parva’ 11) ‘stri Parva’ 12) ‘shanti Parva’ 13) ‘anushasana Parva’ 14) ‘ashvamedhika Parva’ 15) ‘ashramavasika Parva’ 16) ‘Mousala Parva’ 17) ‘Mahaprasthanika Parva’ and 18) ‘svargarohana Parva’. Most people are familiar with these names. the Mahabharata was composed over a period of time. there was an earlier

segment. Let’s call it Mahabharata (O); ‘O’ standing for ‘original’. there was a final text. Let’s call it Mahabharata (F), ‘F’ standing for ‘final’. these things are difficult to date with any precision. therefore, Mahabharata (O) probably dates to 500 BCE, while Mahabharata (F) probably dates to 500 CE. this is a range of 1,000 years. Most scholars will agree on this range. at best, some will say 400 BCE for Mahabharata (O) and 400 CE for Mahabharata (F).

there have been attempts to identify later layers and distinguish them from older layers, such as through examining the evolution of the sanskrit language. But all such attempts are inherently subjective. a quote from 10.35 of Bhagavat Gita is relevant. in this section, Krishna is telling arjuna how he is the most important among various categories. For example, among all shining bodies, he is the sun. among all the gods, he is indra. among all the mountains, he is Meru. among all animals, he is the lion. among all rivers, he is Ganga, and so on. that bit of 10.35 states: ‘among months, i am Margashirsha.’ Margashirsha is also known as agrahayana, roughly from around November 21st to December 20th. Calendars differ across the country, but most people will agree the calendar begins with the month of Chaitra, roughly from March 21st to april 20th. Why would Krishna imply that Margashirsha was the most important among all the months? that can only be because the calendar then started with the month of Margashirsha. One should note that the word ‘agrahayana’ literally means the first month of the year. therefore, when this bit of the Bhagavat Gita was composed, Margashirsha (named after the nakshatra Mrigashira) was the first month of the year and the year started with the full moon in the month of Margashirsha. Many important festivals are still concentrated in Margashirsha. there are reasons why it is difficult to use astronomical data to date events, such as the date of the Kurukshetra War. astronomical calculations moved from nakshatras to rashis (signs of the zodiac), from lunar months to solar months. Lunar months sometimes started with purnima (the day of the full moon), sometimes with amavasya (the day of the new moon). therefore, one has to make assumptions, which in the last resort, are subjective.

Reimagining the GitaThe limits of reading it as an independent text

By Bibek Debroy

indian accents

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 15

subject to this, a respected astronomer named VB Ketkar (Indian and Foreign Chronology, 1921) gives us an answer to the question of when Margashirsha was the first month of the year. his answer gives us a range between 699 BCE and 452 BCE. this part of the Bhagavat Gita is therefore as old as Mahabharata (O).

sanskrit grammar evolved over a period and, after Panini, came to assume a certain structure, especially in what is called classical sanskrit. We haven’t been able to date Panini satisfactorily. sixth century BCE, fifth century BCE or fourth century BCE are reasonable guesses. Linguistic evidence from parts of the Bhagavat Gita show that these sections were written before classical sanskrit became the norm. therefore, fifth century BCE, fourth century BCE, third century BCE—something like that. these parts of the Bhagavat Gita, therefore, pre-date Mahabharata (F) and belong to more or less the same period as Mahabharata (O). Couldn’t there have been a Bhagavat Gita (O) and a Bhagavat Gita (F), with these earlier sections belonging to Bhagavat Gita (O)? Couldn’t there have been multiple authors of the Bhagavat Gita? this is an old issue, discussed threadbare, but never seems to go away. the dead horse keeps kicking every once in a while. in these columns, i have mentioned Yardi’s work, who tested for multiple authorship of both the Bhagavat Gita and the Mahabharata. so as not to maintain the suspense, there was a single author for the Bhagavat Gita and five authors for the Mahabharata. Naturally, this is probabilistic, not deterministic. Nothing can be confidently asserted with certainty. But that’s the way science works. there was a Mahabharata (O) and a Mahabharata (F). But there is no Bhagavat Gita (O) or Bhagavat Gita (F). the Bhagavat Gita is an integrated whole. MR Yardi did his analysis when artificial intelligence (ai) couldn’t be used for such work. ai has now been used to vivisect William shakespeare’s works, such as Henry VIII. Who knows, in the future, ai may also be used to refine the Yardi kind of work.

therefore, a single author composed the Bhagavat Gita around fifth century BCE. Couldn’t the Bhagavat Gita have been authored as an independent text that was spliced into Mahabharata (F) later? i suspect many people who read

the Bhagavat Gita don’t read the Bhagavat Gita sub-parva. Most people are familiar with the 18-parva classification of the Mahabharata, listed earlier. What may not be known is that there is also a parallel 100-parva classification of the Mahabharata, which probably pre-dated the 18-parva classification. Remnants of that remain in the sub-parvas that are part of the 18 main parvas. For example, the Bhagavat Gita occurs in ‘Bhishma Parva’, when Bhishma was the commander of the Kaurva army. Within ‘Bhishma Parva’, there is a Bhagavat Gita sub-parva. this has 994 slokas and 27 chapters. those who know about the Bhagavat Gita will be surprised. isn’t the Bhagavat Gita supposed to

have 700 slokas and 18 chapters? indeed, the Bhagavat Gita does have 700 slokas and 18 chapters, but the sub-parva named after the Bhagavat Gita has a little bit more than what we know as the Bhagavat Gita text. in the 100-parva classification of the BORi edition, this Bhagavat Gita sub-parva is numbered 63. the first nine chapters are about preparations and preliminaries. the 10th chapter then starts with the famous words: ‘Dhritarashtra asked, ‘O sanjaya! having gathered on the holy plains of Kurukshetra, wanting to fight, what did my sons and the sons of Pandu do?’ the first nine chapters lead to the 10th chapter, which is the first chapter of the Bhagavat Gita. there is no break in continuity between the ninth and 10th chapters. the Bhagavat Gita is part of Mahabharata (F). Lest we forget, slokas from the Bhagavat Gita are also found elsewhere in the Mahabharata,

sometimes with minor variations. those who seriously suggest that the Bhagavat Gita is an independent text, interpolated into the Mahabharata later, have probably not read the Mahabharata.

if they do, they will discover these other Gitas in the Mahabharata. We come back of course to the definition of ‘Gita’. if Gita is defined as a text where Krishna himself speaks to arjuna, other than the Bhagavat Gita, one will only have anu Gita. But if Gita is defined as any text that talks about the four human objectives (purusharthas) of dharma, artha, kama and moksha, there are several other texts. Of course, the entire Mahabharata is also about these objectives. n

If GIta Is defIned as a text where KrIshna hImself speaKs

to arjuna, other than the BhaGavat GIta, one wIll only

have anu GIta. But If It Is defIned as any text that talKs aBout the four human oBjectIves (purusharthas) of dharma,

artha, Kama and moKsha, there are several other texts

2 november 202016

The voice of emperor hirohito of Japan was famously heard for the first time when he declared on the radio his country’s surrender in World War ii. essayist Richard Lloyd Parry writes that so

unprecedented was the whole event for the Japanese that many listeners had difficulties understanding the emperor on account of his highly stylised speech. Throughout his long reign, from 1926 to 1989, the emperor had given only one interview in 1975 to an American journalist. his son, emperor Akihito (who abdicated the throne in 2019 to make way for emperor Naruhito, thus bringing to a close the heisei era of the chrysanthemum Throne), did slightly better. he gave occasional but highly scripted press conferences where questions had to be submitted and vetted by the imperial household Agency. on a rare occasion however, this persona of royal discreteness slipped—the word ‘persona’ comes from the Latin word ‘prosopon’, a ‘mask’ used during a performance in order to become another—and Akihito broke away from the script and, uncharacteristically and movingly, spoke out against the pressures that had been put on his wife empress Michiko by social expectations and the vicious gossip sheets. for a brief moment, Akihito the man set aside Akihito the emperor and revealed his inner thoughts, only to recede back into the elaborate persona that had been patiently created over decades through acts of personal sincerity and the halo bestowed by royalty.

on the other end of this menagerie of political inner voices is Donald Trump who—like most politicians who steer their ship within the maelstrom of democratic waters—misses no opportunity to appear in front of cameras and speak ex tempore. Despite his usual grabbag of conspiratorial gossip, innuendo, paranoia, faux nostalgias and racist dogwhistles, unlike other great megalomaniacs in history there is no confusion about who is doing the talking. his speech is littered with first person singular. his administration’s achievements and victories are solely his (and their failures are solely because of others). it is often as if he were inviting us to see the squalid inner quarters of his steadily declining mind which once had the self-confidence of a veteran braggart to declare, “i have the best words.”

But for much of history, the inner worlds and soliloquies

of political leaders, knaves and villains—including in litera-ture—have often posed greater challenges to any efforts to discern who exactly is doing the talking. is it the head of state, the potentate who dictates terms, the man behind the facade or the human cloistered behind the accoutrement of power? for centuries, ever since that great Shakespearean villain Richard iii declared on stage ’Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this son of York/ And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house/ in the deep bosom of the ocean buried’, authors and scholars have wondered who exactly the ‘our’ is in those lines. They ask this because a few lines later, Richard iii re-sorts to a more familiar first person pronoun: ‘But i, that am no shap’d for sportive tricks… i, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty… i, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion…’. This ‘pronoun shifting’ in speech has often been a way for the exteriority of a person, especially in a performative context, to recede and allow for a more reflective inner voice to emerge and allow insecurities and anxieties to burble forth.

in the case of Trump, however, this first person singular is often merely not just an opportunity to catalogue and enumer-ate his self-declared greatness but also an opportunity to use the bully pulpit of the president’s office to speak as if there were no inner restraint. No prejudice was too shameful to utter in public and no paranoia unworthy of treating as fact. it is therefore unsur-prising that many have resorted to thinking of Trump’s manner of speaking that is indistinguishable from a steady lurch towards chaos and cruelty as the id of American body politic.

in the freudian vocabulary, the id is born from unconscious and the ego from the conscious. These mental constructs are drawn as being in directly in opposition—as if the mind’s role was often to participate in an election to choose between the two. The critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis tells us, ‘The id is primitive, the ego civilized; the id is unorganized, the ego organized; the id observes the pleasure principle, the ego the reality principle; the id is emotional, the ego rational.’ All of this naturally lends to useful, but arguably facile, juxtapositions when talking about Trump and Biden. This contrast between the two is played up by a third and singular presence in the American (and democratic) electoral politics: the mainstream media and its handmaiden, social media. To wit, they act like

An American Folk TaleAn alternative portrait of Donald Trump

By Keerthik Sasidharan

touchstone

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 17

the superego—that hectoring, bullying, self-critical part of the ego that borrows freely from the unconscious, and therefore the id. The superego, writes British psychoanalyst Adam Phil-lips, acts a permanent faultfinder. it echoes a line from Samuel Beckett’s novella called Worstward Ho: ‘Something there badly not wrong.’ The superego is like a self-aggrandising Tv anchor or a hectoring father, whose usual rhetorical style is to accuse, to insinuate weakness, to bore you with their righteousness and ultimately pummel you daily with cruel assessments. if we resort to this tripartite division of the American or, more gener-ally, the Western, political mind, the age of Trump has been one where the id and the superego have come together to browbeat the rational ideas of the American self, its ego, into trembling submission. it is perhaps therefore not surprising that Trump’s rallies continue to attract hundreds of thousands of attendees, who pooh-pooh away any risk from the coronavirus and who travel from far and wide to hear him rail against all his, and

implicitly their, complaints about the world: ‘hillary clinton’, ‘china virus’, ‘immigrants’, ‘Mexicans’ and so on.

The fact that despite his catastrophic handling of the covid-19 pandemic, he continues to poll within the margin of statistical error in many states against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should give all a pause. Trump may very well lose by a landslide on November 3rd but Trumpism has sown its seeds in American political grounds. Much like the Reagan-Thatcher era birthed a generation-long belief in neo-liberal institutions and market fundamentalisms, the Trump era has birthed a set of vocabularies that has mainstreamed old, primordial urges of the American body politic: isolationism, xenophobia, white nationalism—all in the name of the collec-tive good. emotions and prejudices which had somehow been tempered by custom, rules and inner restraints of common people have now found ways to appear reasonable and ineluc-table thanks to Trump’s singular presence.

in this sense, Trump has been that little understood phenom-ena in present-day political vocabularies, but one that is all-too-familiar in folk tales—a Great Seducer who, through his own autobiographical soliloquies, has tapped the listener’s subcon-scious complaint that the world is unjust. Seduction, of course, is a dirty word especially in our times when men and women speak about ‘agency’ as if it were a sacramental truth of our inner psychologies. But seducers have appeared throughout history, in guises that are often hidden in plain sight. in folk tales, which are often morality plays—such as ‘Little Red cap’ (made famous in the 17th century version by charles Perrault called ‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’ or ‘The Little Red Riding hood’)—they are ex-plicitly visible. The wolf in that folk tale, as psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has written, is a ‘dangerous seducer’, who ‘represents all the social, animalistic tendencies within ourselves’.

Modernity has spawned many seducers, especially when old order crumbles and fosters cognitive crises—be it when the gods and magic surrendered to scientific explanation (Max Weber called this ‘the disenchantment of the world’), when rituals that marked the relationship between the sacred and the profane eroded (Marcel Mauss called it ‘desacralisation’) or when an individual was set afloat in a sea of meaninglessness thanks to breakdown of social relations (emile Durkheim called this ‘anomie’). Trump, and his soliloquies which are all bile and much fury, appeared at a similar juncture: when economic order has over the past two decades changed all-too-dramatically for many. This is, in parts, the real reason to be pessimistic irrespective of the electoral results. The underlying faultlines of the American polity are only likely to widen as economic insecurity marries with demographic changes to birth strange new anxieties with no names. in a decade from now, we may come to think of Trump as a symptom of malaise and divisions that was intermittently successful in overpowering the rational part of the American po-litical mind. only by then however—faced with a powerful and belligerent china—there will be more calls for an efficient and radical version of all that Trumpism, in its malevolent genius, has set in motion. Winter, after a brief spell of spring, is coming. n

modernity has spawned many seducers, especially when old order crumbles and fosters cognitive crises—be it when the gods and magic surrendered to scientific explanation, when rituals that marked the relationship between the sacred and the profane eroded or when an individual was set afloat in a sea of meaninglessness thanks to breakdown of social relations

I l lustration by Saurabh Singh

2 november 202018

Your freedom ends where my nose begins. As long as what you say or write does not incite violence or cause public disorder, freedom of speech is absolute.

The supreme Court is wrestling with a slew of issues around the limits of free speech. If hate speech causes communal or caste enmity, it breaks the law. There are established provisions in the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) to deal with such breaches of law. There should be no ideological bias in judging these issues, just the sensible application of law.

The controversy over a pro-right bias in social media is facetious. If anything, facebook and Twitter, for example, suffer from a pro-left bias. Hate posts from left extremists are tolerated. Hate poets from right extremists are banned. Both obviously should be banned. But the bias is clear.

Part of the problem is that the left ecosystem is more united and strategic than the right ecosystem. It moves fast, orchestrates a social media storm and ruthlessly discredits key members of the right. The right ecosystem is more divided and less tactical.

The extreme left disguises its fascism and intolerance to other points of view with finesse. The extreme right lets its fascism hang out to dry.

History favours the left: young people are naturally left-leaning and anti-establishment. The right’s demography is older, wealthier and (in America) whiter. In a battle of perception between hoodies and suits, there can be only one winner.

The extreme left covers its tracks well. some of the worst human rights crimes have been perpetrated by left-communist despots from mao Zedong and stalin to Castro and Pol Pot.

The right ecosystem is inarticulate and ponderous. It is shrill and apologetic at the same time, burdened by grievance and constantly seeking approval and validation from the left which treats it with disdain.

Left-leaning TV news channels delight in hectoring members of the right ecosystem who are uncomfortable with english and mumble their way through panel discussions. Left panelists in contrast lie with a straight face and often win the argument.

The left-leaning media in the West forms a cartel of opinion. The modus operandi is well-rehearsed: reuters flashes a piece of inaccurate news, the BBC follows it up, The Guardian adds context, The New York Times picks up the threads, Cnn closes the circle.

The principle of exclusion is an important weapon in the armoury of the left. In media, it ostracises right voices. The left cabal monopolises op-eds in dailies and TV panels. Left-aligned media like NDTV 24X7, The Wire, Scroll, The Caravan, The Telegraph and The Hindu keep up a barrage of negativity.

Good journalism is always adversarial to the government and, to use a tired cliché, must speak truth to power. But it often speaks lies to power. That subverts everything that good journalism stands for.

Criticism is the lifeblood of media. some of the criticism is ideological. so be it. some is made up. Again, so be it. Good journalism delivers news and opinion based on facts. The

plurality of opinion in a democracy evens out the narrative.

If facts are twisted, the market will punish the newspaper, website or channel. A quick glance at television broadcast ratings (BArC) and the Indian readership survey (Irs) show how the market is punishing those who pursue an agenda-driven narrative.

There are fascists on both the left and the right. But those on the left use bullying as standard operating procedure (soP). The real target of every attack by the leftwing-Congress

ecosystem is of course Prime minister narendra modi. read between the lines—or the lines themselves—

and it boils down to an attack on Hindutva, creeping majoritarianism and the erosion of institutional governance. some of these criticisms are justified. The modi Government has failed to tame the bureaucracy, cut over-regulation and take old corruption cases to their conclusion.

modi’s Government must be held to account over its handling of Covid-19, the economy, China and a host of other issues. The criticism should be fierce and fearless. In India, and in the West as well, that is simply not the case.

Left-leaning media deals in fake news to tarnish the government rather than criticise it constructively and offer solutions. right-leaning media on the other hand behaves like the propaganda machinery of the government and loses credibility. It is appalling to see powerful sections of the electronic and print media allowing themselves to be used as arms of the government, abandoning all

critical faculties. Balance—the cornerstone of journalism—is

the victim. n

Left, Right and NowhereWho’s more fascist than the other?

By Minhaz Merchant

saurabh singh

opinion

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor and publisher

While Inside Look

Outside With

For

FREE access

visitwww.openthemagazine.com

A new generation of leaders has become very relevant to the

Bihar election. The Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Tejashwi Yadav has arrived as the main opposition leader. Lok Jan-shakti Party’s Chirag Paswan is the joker in the pack who might have a crucial role to play after the election. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, the main draw remains its perennial trump card—Narendra Modi. In an attempt to create a wave in favour of the Janata Dal (United)-BJP alliance, Modi is all set to address as many as 12 rallies, three in a day. Also, for the first time, he will seek votes for Nitish Kumar, a man who had opposed his elevation as the BJP’s prime ministerial face in 2013 and ended his alliance over it then.

Whisperer Jayanta Ghosal

Old FavOurite

HOme BOund

In what was highly unusual, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan complained in a letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi about her party’s senior leader

Kamal Nath. The latter had in an election rally used derogatory language against a female BJP by-election candidate. Rahul Gandhi, too, had criticised the language but Kamal Nath did not apologise. Instead, he shocked his party by saying that it was Rahul’s personal opinion. A minor issue has now blown up into a major one in the Congress.

The Unusual Complaint

20 2 november 2020

Former Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis may have become the BJP’s in-charge of Bihar for the

election, but it is said he remains busier in his home state. In earlier elections, when Arun Jaitley or any other senior BJP leader was at the helm in a state, they used to stay there for a few months at a stretch, even taking a flat or house on rent. But that is difficult in the times of Covid. So, Fadnavis comes on and off to Patna.

21 september 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 21

I l lustrations by Saurabh Singh

Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, in Mumbai, is extraordinarily wealthy and powerful. Elections to it are,

therefore, very important. For 25 years, the Shiv Sena has been in power there, but last time it fought alone without the BJP in alliance and retained power only by a slender margin. The next elections are only due in 2022 but with the estrangement between the two parties, moves are already afoot on how it will be fought. The big question is what will the Sena do. There are rumours that it might ally with the BJP and that is why its senior leader Sanjay Raut met Devendra Fadnavis recently. But it is also being said that the Sena could fight alone, and if necessary, have a tie-up with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress after the election. The NCP, however, is keen on a pre-poll alliance. Many secret discussions are reportedly already underway.

Because of Covid and its economic impact, several Government projects have stalled. But in this go-slow

situation, the Prime Minister’s dream project of a new Parliament building and a makeover of the area has continued. Old Government buildings will be demolished and the old Parliament will be a museum of the Indian freedom movement. From Rashtrapati Bhavan to India Gate, several buildings will come up. Opposition parties are protesting about the resources being spent but Team Modi maintains this needs to be done.

Kumar Vishwas, who used to be an impor-

tant leader in the Aam Aadmi Party, might have fallen out of favour with its leader Arvind Kejriwal, but both the Congress and the BJP seem to have a soft spot for him. He was a candidate against Rahul Gandhi in Amethi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, but in Rajasthan, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has made Vishwas’ wife Manju a member of Rajasthan Public Service Commission. A Rajasthani, she is a professor from the Mali com-munity to which Gehlot too belongs. Meanwhile, Vishwas’ brother Sanjeev Sharma, a professor at Meerut’s university, was made the vice chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi Central University in Bihar. Some say it was at the behest of the BJP.

advance Plotting

house on Track

Man For all ParTieS

Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari seems to be in some trouble after dashing off a letter attacking

Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray over the reopening of temples, something that the state BJP is keen on. But Union Home Minister Amit Shah, in a media interview, did not support the Governor. Now the Shiv Sena wants the Governor changed. NCP chief Sharad Pawar too hit out at him asking how anyone with self-respect could continue in office. There could be a reshuffle of governors after the Bihar elections and Koshyari must be wondering about his fate. The Centre not supporting Koshyari led to much interest in West Bengal where Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has also written a letter to the Prime Minister complaining about the Governor there, Jagdeep Dhankhar. She asked why, if there is so much reaction to Koshyari’s utterances, no action has been taken against Dhankhar who has been speaking against her for a long time.

In Karnataka, senior Congress leader MB Patil, who is a figurehead of the

powerful Lingayat community, could be switching to the BJP. Although Patil tweeted that the rumours are baseless, he did not rule out the possibility. The BJP central leadership may also be searching for a Lingayat leader as a counter to their state leader and Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa who, too, retains enormous pull in the community.

backfired attack

Lingayat Alternative

2 november 202022

he ceasefire announced by the Prc in the sino-indian war came into effect on 20 november 1962. it meant different things to different people, particularly those involved as prominent personalities in the autumn war.

in the opulent and sybaritic luxury of room 118 in the Great hall of the People in the Zhongnanhai district of Peking, chairman Mao Tse Tung stared at the collection of late autumn leaves on the lawn outside his window. he needed to be distracted from the matters of state. The distraction was in the form of a coy teenage girl.

in a riveting book, Mao’s physician, dr Li Zhisui, has revealed that Mao had an insatiable appetite for sex and was quite happy to manifest his sexual desire with either gender. But in november 1962, during the sino-indian war, Mao was besotted by a young 14-year-old girl called chen. she was his favourite partner from the diverse supply of young people available in his harem. Mao was obsessed with longevity and, according to dr Li, he used to follow the ancient daoist prescription for ageing men to supplement their declining yang or male energy with yin shui or the water of

yin. Yin shui was the vaginal secretion of young women. Because yang is considered essential to health and power, it cannot be dissipat-ed. Thus, when engaged in coitus, the male rarely ejaculates. frequent coition is, therefore, necessary to increase the amount of yin shui.

however, in pursuit of many women, Mao contracted trichomonas vaginalis, but because he was asymptomatic, he refused to be treated for it. instead, he became a chronic source of transmission of the disease. interestingly, trichomonas vaginalis also leads to psychiatric disorders. What is fascinating is that Mao, who professed to be an atheist and a communist, was actually a follower of the ancient chinese religion of daoism. This religious philosophy co-existed along with confucianism in ancient china, particu-larly during the eastern Zhou period which gave rise to the chinese dream of world domination. Was Mao’s ruthless cruelty along with his delusions of grandeur a consequence of this disease? dr Li Zhisui obliquely alludes to it. it is unfortunate that in those days, the Government of india had an inadequate system of intelligence from within china and that it was, therefore, unable to decipher the reasons for Mao’s almost visceral hatred of india.

For nehru, The news of the dire threat to the plains of assam, brought to him on 19 november by General Thapar, was devastating. according to shiv Kunal Verma, the author of The War that Wasn’t, on the morning of 20 november 1962, all of

india was still in the dark about the ceasefire because the indian chargé d’affaires in Peking had not relayed the news to new delhi. nehru had summoned Lt. Gen. Thorat, now retired, by special aircraft to new delhi, ostensibly to offer him the job of coas in the wake of General Thapar’s resignation. When Thorat met him in the morning, a sleep-deprived nehru was cutting a cigarette into tiny pieces with a pair of scissors. since the conversation between nehru and Thorat veered round to Krishna Menon and degener-ated into acrimony, nehru was distracted and Thorat left without receiving a job offer.

nehru wanted Kaul to succeed General Thapar; however, President radhakrishnan dissuaded nehru from taking that step. The next

When the CIA came to India’s rescue in 1962

Mao against nehru

T

open essay

By iqBal Chand Malhotra

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 23

in line to be offered the job was Lt. Gen. daulet singh, who passed on the offer. after Menon’s resignation was accepted by nehru on 1 november 1962 in the midst of the war, nehru personally took charge of the Ministry of defence. Menon, with due credit to him, recommended Thorat for the top job, even though he had earlier sabotaged Thorat’s natural succession. now, with Thorat getting nehru’s goat, the job by default went to Lt. Gen. J.c. chaudhuri.

For Mao, Who had successfully drained the indian establishment of their ‘collective mojo’, the task of keeping

Lop nor out of public gaze remained, notwithstanding the ‘victory’ over india.

in the early 1950s, soviet aerial surveys of the shaksgam Val-ley revealed that the shaksgam river originated in an area be-tween the shaksgam Glacier and the shaksgam Pass. This river merges with the raskam river at a point called chog Jangal and, thereafter, the combined river is known as the Yarkand river. The Yarkand river merges with the Tarim river. The shaksgam river lies on the northern side of the Karakorum watershed as does the Karakash river that flows north from aksai chin

and merges into the Tarim river. Both the shaksgam river and the Karakash river originate within the political boundary of Maharaja hari singh’s state of Jammu and Kashmir that merged with india on 26 october 1947. Because of his unwillingness to let the indian army recover the entire lost territory of this state from the clutches of the Pakistan army whose proxies invaded the state on 22 october 1947, nehru was responsible for india losing territorial control over the shaksgam river in 1947. further, because of nehru’s unwillingness to prevent the sino-soviet invasion of aksai chin in March 1950, india lost territorial control over the Karakash river to china.

Both the shaksgam river and the Karakash river flow into the western part of the Tarim river. The eastern part of the Tarim river that flowed into Lake Lop nor was scheduled to become radioactive; so was Lake Lop nor. The latter was going to be the drainage point of all the radioactive debris from china’s proposed nuclear tests. it, therefore, became crucial for china to usurp and claim ownership over both the shaksgam river and the Karakash river in order to provide for the future irrigation needs of the entire Tarim Basin post the nuclear tests that were planned. in effect, china had to steal both these rivers

At the White House on 19 November, Kennedy convened a high-powered meeting that discussed increased US military assistance to India and options for a show of force in the region. Also mentioned was the possibility of using the CIA’s Tibetan guerrillas. The new CIA Director John McCone, who replaced Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs, was on hand to brief Kennedy on such covert matters. With McCone was Des FitzGerald, the CIA’s Far East Chief

John F Kennedy and Jawaharlal Nehru at the White House, November 1961

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if it wanted to go nuclear at the selected site of Lop nor.second, Kim Philby had leaked the knowledge of the three

British nuclear monitoring stations in the Gilgit agency to the soviets. By the by, china also came to know of them. after Pakistan joined seaTo and cenTo pacts in 1954, it was specu-lated that there was a proposal by the British to set up a fourth nuclear monitoring station in raskam Village in the shaksgam Valley or Trans Karakoram tract, which was ceded to china as part of the sino-Pak Boundary agreement signed on 2 March 1963. Today, this village is known by its chinese name of Yilike. a metallic road connects it with Mazha, which is a junction on the chinese sinkiang-Tibet highway, now called c219.

if a nuclear monitoring station had been set up at raskam Village, it would have looked over the Taklamakan desert directly at Lop nor. Therefore, it became critical for china to le-gitimise ownership of the shaksgam Valley and build the basis of a deep and lasting friendship with Pakistan. Mao was thus able to erect an impenetrable wall of secrecy around Lop nor.

meanWhiLe, one of the first things that General chaudhuri did was to order an investigation into the

military debacle in october and november 1962, during the just-concluded hostilities. for this investigation, General chaudhuri appointed a team of two officers led by Lt. Gen. henderson Brooks, then the Goc Xi corps. Brigadier P.s. Bha-gat vc (later Lt. Gen.), then the commandant at iMa, dehra-dun, was the junior member of this team. it is said that General chaudhuri was initially keen to initiate a full-fledged study of the ‘debacle of 1962’, but he was advised to avoid any inves-tigation on the higher direction of that conflict. This would require the Brooks-Bhagat team to access files pertaining to governmental decisions. and this was unacceptable. india’s new defence Minister Y.B. chavan stated that the government was unwilling to institute an enquiry into its very own policies and decisions.

as a result, the terms of reference of the henderson Brooks-Bhagat report, as it came to be popularly known, was to look

only at what went wrong militarily—issues like training, equipment, physical fitness of troops and the role of military commanders. The purpose of this exercise seemed to fix the blame only on the ‘failure of military commanders and to the tactical mishan-dling of troops on the ground’, chavan said in a low-key statement to the Parliament. Moreover, the focus of the enquiry was re-stricted to the operations of iV corps, which was responsible for the debacle in nefa. The outcome in Ladakh or the western sector was not even considered. nevertheless, what the two distinguished officers produced was an unforgiving analysis of the prob-lems along the entire sino-indian border, discovering along the way a great deal that Lt. Gen. B.M. Kaul would like to have kept hidden. The report laid the blame on army hQ for its direct interference by bypassing the established chains of command for the deployment of troops on the frontline against the chinese. The example cited is of the general staff in delhi giving direct orders to hQ 7 Brigade, bypassing the established chains of hQ eastern command, hQ iV corps and hQ 4 Mountain division in order to capture a PLa post 1,000 yards north-east of the legendary dhola Post, and to contain PLa concentration south of Thag La ridge at the nefa frontline. This order could be seen to be as incredible as the order for ‘the charge of the light brigade’ during the crimean War in the mid-19th century.

open essay

Mao Zedong, 1957

In pursuit of many women, Mao contracted trichomonas vaginalis, but because he was asymptomatic, he refused to be treated for it. Instead, he became a chronic source of transmission. Trichomonas vaginalis also leads to psychiatric disorders. Was Mao’s ruthless cruelty along with his delusions of grandeur a consequence of this disease?

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The controversial sinophile and indophobe author neville Maxwell opines that henderson Brooks and Bhagat placed the immediate cause of the collapse of resistance in nefa on the panicky, fumbling and contradictory orders issued from iV corps hQ in Tezpur to a coterie of officers they judged to be grossly culpable, namely Lt. Gen. L.P. ‘Bogey’ sen, Lt. Gen. B.M. ‘Biji’ Kaul, Maj. Gen. niranjan Prasad and Brigadier (later Maj. Gen.) d.K. ‘Monty’ Palit. But the investigation, even if it wanted to, could not have access to records of meetings in the Ministry of defence, since Menon had categorically disallowed any notes or minutes to be kept of his meetings, saying these were top secret in nature. Therefore, the Brooks-Bhagat team was unable to access crucial information to see if the blame lay on Krishna Menon and his core team. it thus absolved them of responsibility for their blunders in the ultimate analysis.

In ocToBer 1962, after nehru fully understood the import of the chinese invasion, which left him floundering

around trying to figure out how to handle this enormous crisis, the ever crafty Mullick put across a very unusual proposal.

Mullick said that he had a chat with sir roger hollis, the then dG of Mi5, which was the parent organisation of the iB. hollis had suggested that the iB create a force of Tibetan saboteurs to undertake cross-border clandestine sabotage of PLa units, garrisons and facilities in Tibet. for the purposes of deniability, the force should only be staffed with Tibetans. The force should be modelled along the lines of the second World War British organisation called the special operations execu-tive or soe. Mullick added that there was an army officer who was a perfect fit to head such a force. This was a distinguished and decorated officer who had served in the Long-range desert Group of the British army that conducted sabotage opera-tions behind German lines in north africa during the second

World War. This officer was Maj. Gen. s.s. uban. Mullick also convinced nehru that since the British had no money and fewer resources, he could get these at no cost from the americans. it was necessary to do things correctly.

What Mullick in all probability did not disclose to nehru was that the suggestion to create such a force had actually come from cia chief allen dulles who was interested in fixing the lack of effective co-ordination between the cia and the large unwieldy force of Tibetan chushi Gandrug guerrillas operating from the nepalese border region of Mustang. if india joined in, then things would get much easier. a crest-fallen and floundering nehru could find no fault with Mullick’s suggestion. since the British had successfully created and oper-ated such a force of both British and expatri-

ate europeans to hit targets behind German lines, there was no reason why such a force of indian-trained Tibetans could not do the same behind chinese lines.

The executive order authorising such a force was issued by the Government of india on 14 november 1962, which was also nehru’s birthday. Mullick had proposed this as nehru’s gift to the nation on his birthday. extraordinary times require extraordinary decisions. setting up establishment 22 was in many ways anathema to a man like nehru who had an aver-sion to all such martial activities, particularly of the cloak and dagger variety. By withholding the use of the air force in the war and ensuring the rout of the army in nefa, Mullick had paradoxically expanded the remit of his empire. he had added paramilitary-based black ops to his repertoire. a tripartite agreement between the iB, the cia and chushi Gandrug was signed, with the Tibetan outfit represented by General Gompo Tashi andrugtsang and Jogo namgyal dorjee. chushi Gan-drug was to source 12,000 Tibetan Khampa fighters from the potential recruits available in Mustang in nepal. These were Mullick’s own equivalent of the Gorkhas. Thus, the indian state now had two streams of foreign mercenaries fighting for it, namely the Gorkhas from nepal in the indian army and the Khampas from Tibet in establishment 22.

The dalai Lama’s elder brother Gyalo Thondup, who was at that time deeply involved with the cia, flew to Mustang with a team of cia and iB officers to interview and select the front echelon of Tibetan officers for the new force at its hQ in chakrata near dehradun, then in the state of uP. The initial complement of Tibetan officers was led by a man called Jamba Kalden. The cia sent an eight-member team of instructors led by former united states Marine corps (usMc) colonel Wayne sanford who helped set up the entire matrix of the force. colo-nel sanford was the then head of the cia’s special operations Group. The cia was investing a lot in this business.

Galbraith had a qualified change of heart because Krishna Menon was no longer the Defence Minister. By the end of the Harriman mission, the CIA and IB had arrived at a rough division of labour. The IB, with CIA support, would work towards developing Establishment 22 as a tactical guerrilla force

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nehru aPPeaLed To Kennedy for assistance. imme-diately, Washington stepped into the fray and responded

generously to nehru’s appeal for assistance. By 2 november, the usaf had already flown eight missions into india every day for a week by using europe-based Boeing 707 transports. each plane was packed with basic infantry equipment to refit the soldiers streaming off the himalayas, who, in most cases, were outfitted with more primitive gear than had been af-forded to even the cia’s Tibetan guerrillas. These supplies were later ferried by usaf c-130 transports to smaller airfields near the frontier battle lines.

at the White house on 19 november, Kennedy convened a high-powered meeting that discussed increased us military assistance to india and options for a show of force in the region. also mentioned was the possibility of using the cia’s Tibetan guerrillas. The new cia director John Mccone, who replaced allen dulles after the Bay of Pigs, was on hand to brief Kennedy on such covert matters. With Mccone was des fitzGerald, the cia’s far east chief. at the end of the meeting, it was decided that ambassador-at-Large averell harriman would lead a high-powered delegation to new delhi to fully assess india’s

needs. General Paul adams, chief of the us strike command, was to head the military component. from the cia, des fitzGerald won a seat for the mission, as did the head of the Tibet Task force, Ken Knaus. on 21 november, harriman’s delegation left for new delhi. although the chinese declared a unilateral cease-fire while the group was en route, the situation was still tense when it reached new delhi the following day. Without a pause, ambassador Galbraith ushered harriman into the first of four meetings with nehru. The results of these discus-sions were plans for a major three-phase military aid package encompassing material support, help with domestic defence production and possible as-sistance with air defences.

The national security action Memorandum number 209, approved on 10 december 1962 by JfK, authorised a new military aid package for india. un-der the aid programme, it was decided that the us would:

1. assist in creating and equipping six new mountain divisions to work with the indian army to guard the himalayas,

2. help india increase its own arms production facilities and

3. prepare for a us–uK air defence programme for india

as a sideshow to harriman’s talks, the cia representatives on the delegation held their own sessions with Mullick and his deputy M.M.L. hooja. This was a first, as Galbraith had previously taken great pains to downscale the agency’s activi-ties inside india to all but benign reporting functions. as early as 5 november, he had objected to projected cia plans due to the risk of exposure. But in a 13 november letter to Kennedy, Galbraith had a qualified change of heart because Menon was no longer the defence Minister. By the end of the harriman mission, the cia and iB had arrived at a rough division of labour. The iB, with cia support from the near east division, would work towards developing establishment 22 as a tactical guerrilla force. The cia’s far east division, in the meantime, would unilaterally create a strategic long-range resistance movement inside Tibet. The Mustang contingent would also

remain under the cia’s unilateral control. n

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Indian troops in NEFA, 1962

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sThe focus of the enquiry was restricted to the operations of IV Corps, which was responsible for the debacle in NEFA. The outcome in Ladakh or the western sector was not even considered. Nevertheless, what Henderson Brooks and PS Bhagat produced was an unforgiving analysis of the problems along the entire Sino-Indian border

This is an edited excerpt from red fear: The china Threat (Bloomsbury; 356 pages; Rs 799) by Iqbal Chand Malhotra to be released on November 2nd. Malhotra is an author and award-winning TV producer

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28

ill about the end of June, Dr Tanaji Lakal would look out nervously from the window of his office in Osmanabad Civil Hospital and feel grateful. By that time, the Covid-19 pandemic had swept through Maharashtra’s large cities, such as Mumbai and Pune, and begun to make inroads into the state’s smaller cities and towns. But somehow it seemed Osmanabad was being spared. “The whole city was in a green zone for

H o w I l l I s I n d I a ’ s H e a l t H s e c t o r ?

TWith government hospitals overburdened, bottomlines of p r iva te ones wiped out, and an insurance system that seems to be unable to wrap its head around the pandemic, Covid-19 has laid bare India’s health infrastructure

Cover Story

By Lhendup G Bhutia

Photograph by raul irani

H o w I l l I s I n d I a ’ s H e a l t H s e c t o r ?With government hospitals overburdened, bottomlines of p r iva te ones wiped out, and an insurance system that seems to be unable to wrap its head around the pandemic, Covid-19 has laid bare India’s health infrastructure

2 november 2020

a very long time. And even when the vi-rus was spreading into nearby districts, we were getting only a few cases,” Lakal says.

And then came July. The number of cases began to grow

rapidly across the district from then on. Osmanabad, to the south-eastern end of the state, consists of many small vil-lages. While there are a few minor pri-vate hospitals in the city of Osmanabad, for both the city and the entire district, the Osmanabad Civil Hospital, with its over 400 beds, remains its most vital healthcare set-up.

w hen the sudden surge began, the hospital didn’t just get cases of pa-tients who had either travelled from

cities such as Mumbai and Pune or had relatives visiting from those areas, Lakal says. There were also farmers who had remained aloof in their fields for months. Soon, the hospital was close to breaking point. Even when a centre came up nearby where the mildly symptomatic patients would be sent, there were not enough beds in the hospital. There were shortages of drugs and oxygen cylinders, the nursing staff was untrained in procedures such as when and how to use nasal cannulas to deliver oxygen to patients, and perhaps the most crucial, there were just two doc-tors for the entire hospital. Lakal and his colleague Dr Pravin Dumne divided their duties between themselves in 24-hour-long shifts. “That was the only way. One of us would do a 24-hour-long shift and the other would take the next shift,” Lakal says. “We would spend almost our entire shift drenched in sweat in PPE suits. It was ex-hausting because we had to be everywhere. And so many were dying too.”

In July, Lakal’s colleague Dumne be-came infected. The following month, Lakal himself had to be admitted to the ICU with the infection.

Much of the focus during the pan-demic has been on large cities where the disease first appeared and continues to take a heavy toll. But in less urban areas, especially those which lie close to these big cities, the pain has been no different. Here, the shortage of doctors and trained health-

Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Limited

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2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 31

care workers becomes more glaring, the paucity and inadequacy of healthcare centres starker. For instance, in the state of Maharashtra, which continues to lead in total number of infections so far, it is estimated that there is a need of 19,752 doctors, nurses and paramedics to fight Covid. According to an Indian Express report, as of September 15th, 12,574 of the posts were vacant. Of the 1,700 Class I doctor posts (including specialists) that the Public Health Department needs to fill, only 538 have been.

In many of the more rural areas of India, such as the district of Osmanabad which lies close to cities like Mumbai and Pune, the healthcare system has come close to collapsing. There has been a respite in the last few weeks, but many worry that there could be another wave of large infections, brought on by the

coming festivals. The surge lasted right up to the begin-

ning of October in Osmanabad. But over the last few weeks, in a pattern mirroring the rest of the country, infection numbers have begun to come down in this district too. Help has also arrived. Two private doctors and a few AYUSH doctors have been contracted at the hospital. The care of patients has now been divided among the doctors in a better manageable four units, with a single doctor having to pull a 24-hour shift just once in four days.

“It’s become much better now,” Lakal says. “But I still worry what might happen if things went bad again.”

t he healthcare set-up across cities and rural areas, both government and private, is currently in disas-

trous shape. While the rush of patients has laid bare the inadequacy of govern-ment hospitals, most private hospitals are in a financial mess. While the costs of running a hospital during a pan-demic have shot up, revenue streams, especially from international patients and complex surgeries such as organ transplants, two categories that make up the bulk of private hospitals’ revenue streams, have nearly collapsed. To add to the chaos, there is a tug-of-war going on between insurance companies and private hospitals over what should be the adequate pricing of treatment protocols for Covid patients. There have even been instances of doctors threatening to go on strike over unpaid salaries.

Dr Rohinton Dastur, the medical di-rector of Bhatia Hospital, a well-reputed private hospital in South Mumbai, told Open a few months ago that many pri-vate hospitals are close to shutting down. Costs from the need for frequent testing, PPE suits, and higher financial incentives for healthcare staffers to continue work-ing in the pandemic have shot up, while revenue remains low. “I know a lot of hos-pitals which won’t be able to sustain this way beyond two months,” he said.

IndiaSpend, studying the balance sheets of some of India’s leading private hospitals, found many of them were bleeding. The total income from opera-

tions of Fortis Healthcare, for instance, had fallen 46.8 per cent or Rs 532.4 crore when the April-June quarter of 2019 (Rs 1,138.3 crore in income) was com-pared to the April-June quarter of this year (Rs 606 crore in income). The company reported a Rs 178.9 crore net loss in the quarter compared to the Rs 67.8 crore net profit for the same period last year. Na-rayana Hrudayalaya saw a Rs 383.9 crore dip in total income from operations (from Rs 777.4 crore to Rs 393.5 crore), with a reported net loss of Rs 119.7 crore for the same period compared to a Rs 30.3 crore net profit in the same quarter of the pre-vious year. ‘The trend persists for smaller and mid-sized listed hospitals such as Kovai Medical and Artemis Medical Ser-vices,’ IndiaSpend reported. ‘Kovai Medical saw its total income from operations fall from Rs 165.4 crore to Rs 129 crore, while

Artemis Medical Services posted a Rs 73 crore drop in revenue year-on-year from Rs 135.7 crore to Rs 62.7 crore.’

According to Dilip Jose, Managing Director and CEO of Manipal Hospitals, while the biggest impact to their hos-pitals’ revenue stream was in the early months of the pandemic when the lock-down was enforced, even when more people are visiting hospitals for non-Covid treatment, normalcy hasn’t yet returned. “The biggest impact on patient footfalls was in April, when the fear of the virus was probably at its highest and travel restrictions were near-total. Overall, OPD (out-patient department) visits fell to

Cover Story

“ “Some 18 states have notified price caps, but the implementation hasn’t happened. So even if hospitals do not adhere to these,

there is no regulation that can check them Bejon Kumar Misra,

consumer policy expert

2 november 202032

about 20 per cent of pre-Covid levels and consequently there was a similar decline of in-patients too. Both reflected in the rev-enue, which dropped to about a third of that in January or February,” he says. “Elec-tive procedures constitute a significant proportion of the work in hospitals and almost every patient opted to postpone such interventions. Sadly, even lifesav-ing procedures like organ transplants or treatments for serious conditions like cancer were delayed in the early months of Covid. Even now, well over six months into the pandemic, such elective inter-ventions are yet to return to earlier levels. Keeping aside its impact on the income of the hospitals, the tragedy is that lives that could otherwise have been saved or had a better quality, are being lost,” he adds. Pointing to the higher costs most private hospitals now incur, Jose says, “The increase in operating costs are on account of cost of PPEs, additional clean-ing cycles and sanitisation, reduced work hours for healthcare professionals as well as special allowances for staff engaged in caring for Covid patients. Further, there are significant costs incurred on quar-antine, alternative accommodation and other facilities for employees. Capital expenses were also incurred to set up fever clinics, testing facilities and to make changes to the hospital infrastructure to treat Covid patients.”

By the end of last month, more pa-tients had begun to visit hospitals. In the Manipal Hospitals’ chain, most of their hospitals have seen OPD visits at about 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels and

in-patient occupancy at near normalcy by September-end. “However, these in-clude Covid patients, who form a sizeable proportion of both. Elective procedures remain below normal trends and these are visible in specialties like orthopae-dics, neuro sciences and cardiac scienc-es. Avoidable morbidities and perhaps deaths too are occurring even today.

Regretfully, that would be very dispro-portionate to the risk of contracting the infection from a hospital, if that is what is preventing patients from accessing treat-ment,” Jose says.

Various state governments have re-sponded to the pandemic by clamping down on prices and forcing private hospi-tals to reserve beds for Covid-19 patients.

Cover Story

“ I know a lot of hospitals which will not be able to sustain this way

beyond two months””Dr Rohinton Dastur,

medical director, Bhatia Hospital

Various state governments have responded to the pandemic by clamping down on prices and forcing private hospitals to reserve beds for Covid patients. These, hospitals claim, have also hurt their bottomline

A lIfE-SAvINg SuRgERy uNdERwAy AT INdRAPRASThA APollo hoSPITAl IN NEw dElhI, AuguST 16

Photograph by raul irani

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 33

These, hospital representatives claim, have also hurt their bottomline. There is currently a PIL in the Supreme Court that seeks to curb the prices private hos-pitals can charge for treatment of Covid patients. The General Insurance Council responded to this issue by releasing an indicative rate chart for Covid treatment, but private hospital associations, such as the Association of Healthcare Providers (India), have come out with their own charge structure which is far higher. Dr Alexander Thomas, the president of the association, did not respond to re-quests for an interview, but he has told a media outlet that they have shared their rates with the council and are trying to reach a consensus.

M any patients have also found it difficult to get their Covid-19 treat-ment expenses covered by their

health insurances. While the Insurance Regulatory and Development Author-ity of India (IRDAI) has issued circulars instructing insurance companies to cover Covid-19 if an existing policy already cov-ers hospitalisation, and also pushing them to process Covid claims expeditiously, problems have persisted. One such has arisen over price caps on private hospi-tals—with the hospital insisting these caps do not extend to those with insurance while many insurance companies refuse to pay anything in excess of that.

According to Bejon Kumar Misra, an international consumer policy expert, while many state governments have

introduced price caps, these do not have any legal standing. “These would come under the Clinical Establishments (Reg-istration and Regulation) Act, 2010, but so far no state government has imple-mented it. Some 18 states have just no-tified it, but the implementation hasn’t happened. So even if hospitals do not adhere to the price caps, there is no regu-lation really that can check them from doing so,” he says. Misra points out that much of the blame for the current im-passe between insurance companies and private hospitals lies with IRDAI. “The body is too beholden to insurance companies. They will often meet insur-ance companies, but as a policy holder (or activist) it is impossible to meet them even with genuine concerns,” he says.

In such a situation, it is not a surprise, he says, that insurance companies have refused to completely honour their poli-cies during the pandemic. One of the results of the impasse, Misra points out, is that many private hospitals have stopped taking cashless options for pol-icy holders, and when patients seek to reimburse their costs, they are told they have been overcharged.

When asked about the price caps in-troduced by various state governments, Jose says that private hospitals stepped up to take on the challenge and to work with governments during this pandemic. “While in many instances, the price caps that were fixed were seen as not taking into account the actual cost of care, hos-pitals went ahead with providing treat-ment, separating their duty from the

dialogue on the prices. Major hospital groups have the ability and balance sheet to tide over resulting losses, but there are many instances of standalone facilities or nursing homes closing down as they were unable to deal with such a situation. The larger distress is losing hospital capacity at a time when the country requires every possible bed to be available,” he says.

According to Jose, of the nearly 15 lakh hospital beds in India, over 60 per cent are in the private sector, and smaller facili-ties account for a bulk of that. “Revival of stressed hospitals needs to be a priority, so that investments already made are not lost. Larger hospital groups may be able to play some role in that direction, but a lot would depend on the steps that government(s), regulatory bodies and financial institutions take,” he says.

In Poladpur, a remote taluka at the southern end of Maharashtra’s Raigad dis-trict, Rajesh Salagare mans a tiny hospi-tal of about 30 beds. This is like the many small centres that dot India’s countryside, unremarkable in appearance but serving as a vital link.

Salagare is an AYUSH doctor and at night he is relieved by another. For years, there has been a vacancy for three special-ised doctors but this has never been filled. Until Covid-19 hit this remote hospital, a majority of Salagare’s patients were peo-ple who had been bitten by snakes or scor-pions, or women at childbirth. Occasion-ally, people who had injured themselves in accidents on the nearby Mumbai-Goa highway were brought in. But patients with severe cases used to be mostly sent away to distant, bigger hospitals.

When Covid hit the area, this small hospital was made to double up as a screening centre. “RT-PCR results take three days here. So we would have to keep the suspected Covid patients here with the others until the result came,” he says. “Plus there was the regular work. It just became very difficult,” he adds.

“I am an AYUSH doctor. I can treat snake bites and things like that. All this is beyond me,” Salagare says. For now, this AYUSH doctor and his unremarkable but vital hospital in the countryside are soldiering on. n

““Revival of stressed hospitals needs to be a priority, so that investments already made are not lost. Larger hospital

groups may be able to play some role in that directionDilip Jose,

managing director, Manipal Hospitals

B e P a t i e n t B e i n g n o n - C o v i d p a t i e n t s i n t h e t i m e o f a p a n d e m i c

Cover Story

EmErgEncy ward at Jawaharlal nEhru mEdical collEgE and hospital in Bhagalpur, Bihar, July 27

www.openthemagazine.com 35

When Sadhna, 62, wife of Ved Prakash, a retired Army officer, got high fever in September, the family went into a tizzy. A former cancer patient, Sadhna ensured she and her family took every

precaution possible and then some against Covid-19. The fever subsided the next morn-ing only to be replaced by an altogether terrifying development: excessive blood in urine. “By that time we knew this was a prob-lem related to her other health concerns but we were still on the fence about going to the hospital,” says Prakash. As it turned out, the decision as to whether Sadhna should go to hospital or not wasn’t really the family’s to make but the hospital’s. It began with Arte-mis Hospital in Gurugram where Prakash was told that his wife’s condition was seri-ous enough to warrant immediate admis-sion—but they had no beds available. Of the two Army hospitals in Delhi, Base hospital was handling only Covid-19 patients while Research & Referral was prioritising serving personnel over retired. “We went to at least four hospitals and called up nearly every big one in Gurugram but every time we were told there were no beds.” In the case of Columbia Asia Hospital in Gurugram, the hospital first agreed to admit Sadhna and even started the paperwork but the minute it realised Prakash

B e P a t i e n t B e i n g n o n - C o v i d p a t i e n t s i n t h e t i m e o f a p a n d e m i c

By Nikita Doval

From shortage of beds to lack of transparency in treatment and struggle to get access to non-Covid-19 treatments, the average Indian has been hit by a strained healthcare infrastructure that was already creaky to begin withr

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2 november 202036

was seeking admission under the Ex-Ser-vicemen Contributory Health Scheme, it said no beds were available, Prakash alleges. The family did find a hospital in Gurugram finally but only after tap-ping some influential contacts. All this unfolded over 28 hours during which Sadhna’s condition kept worsening.

Ved Prakash’s struggle to get a bed for his wife during the pandemic is a small example of what patients—both Covid-19 and non-Covid-19—and their families across the country are going through. From shortage of beds to lack of transparency in treatment to exor-bitant bills and struggle to get access to non-Covid-19 treatments, the average Indian has been hit by a strained health-care infrastructure that was already creaky to begin with.

In April, advocate Sachin Jain filed a PIL against the ex-orbitant rates being charged by private hospitals for Co-vid-19 treatment. Citing a newspaper report where a patient had been billed Rs 12 lakh for Covid-19 treatment, the PIL stated that billing by private hospitals was ‘highly inflated and unreasonable’. The PIL sought price regula-tions in private hospitals to make them ‘affordable and accessible’. Maharashtra, the worst hit right from the be-ginning of the pandemic, be-came one of the first states to cap Covid-19 treatment rates in private hospitals. Gujarat and Tamil Nadu followed. Delhi, equally badly hit, de-cided not to regulate pricing in hospitals then.

In the first week of June, a ‘rate card’ attributed to Max Hospital Patparganj in Delhi started doing the rounds on social media where the daily rate of an ICU bed with ven-tilator was Rs 72,000. Max Hospital explained that the rate included fees for all routine tests, medicines,

doctors and nurses but it was enough to cause panic. Public pressure was enough on the government to control the rates in private hospitals and by June 20th, the government had prescribed maxi-mum per-day charges. An isolation bed was capped at Rs 10,000; ICU without ventilator support was to be charged Rs 13,000-15,000 and with ventilator was capped at Rs 18,000. Private hospitals, as expected, were up in arms, complaining these prices were not feasible.

R ajinder Saxena’s sister was admitted to a Delhi hospital in June for Covid treatment under the gov-

ernment notified cap but on discharge he found that he had been charged for

things which should have been includ-ed in the package but weren’t. His sister was conscious throughout and had kept a track of medicines consumed and even doctor visits and they found that the hos-pital had inflated nearly every aspect of their bill. “More advanced critical care, talent—all these are the strengths of big corporate hospitals in India. In the case of Covid-19, complications can mean a prolonged stay for a patient and hospi-tals will not discharge you unless you are completely stable. For instance, hospitals claim a certain amount of personal pro-tection equipment (PPE) use each day. It is an easy item on which to inflate num-bers. It is difficult to understand what families are being charged for in the final bills,” says Malini Aisola, co-convener of

thE rEcEption at yatharth hospital in noida, uttar pradEsh, sEptEmBEr 27

PPE is an easy item for inflating numbers. It is difficult to understand what families are being charged for in the final bills, according to Malini Aisola, co-convener of All India Drug Action Network

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All India Drug Action Network (AIDAN). The organisation is at the forefront of helping patients get redress. Aisola can go on citing cases of patients from all over the country who had no one but civil society organisations to help them as hospitals overcharge on the pretext of the pandemic. There have been instances of hospitals refusing to hand over bodies to families due to unpaid bills in defiance of court rulings.

When Ashish Chatterjee’s elderly cousin felt feverish on September 10th, the family was immediately on the phone with their doctor. A diagnosis of probable typhoid was given but on September 15th, the patient developed breathing difficulty. “My cousin was 62, diabetic and overweight. He kept saying he would not go to a hospital. He believed that if he went in, he won’t come out. We didn’t listen to him and took him to Fortis in Noida.” From the general ward where he was admitted, Chatterjee’s cousin was moved the next day to the Covid-19 ward after the hospital said his test result was positive. “We got a video from the atten-dant that day in which my cousin can be heard talking about the things he needs, including a pair of slippers so that he can walk up and down. That was the last we saw him conscious. We were informed of requirements like plasma via phone calls or messages. The hospital did not ask us about his medical history so that Covid-19 treatment could be adjusted accordingly and our attempts to reach out, engage were stonewalled. Even the daily updates we got were a hardwon privilege.” Chatterjee’s cousin’s situation deteriorated on September 19th when he had to be put on the ventilator. He died on September 21st of a heart attack. “It has been a month now and we still don’t have any answers as to how it all accelerated. Was he even really Covid positive? There are questions galore and no answers.”

Lack of transparency and violations of patients’ rights are just some of the issues families are struggling with even as hos-pitals continue to obfuscate processes.

The Chatterjee family was still lucky that their bill (upwards of Rs 5 lakh) was settled by the insurance company with-out a fuss. Most patients, especially those who have been handed bills upwards of Rs 10 lakh, find themselves running from pillar to post trying to deal with both the hospital and the insurance company. People complain of policies that start with a reasonable enough cover only to be exhausted midway through the treatment. Hospitals also segregate insured patients by not admitting them under the government cap scheme even as some insurance companies refuse to cover expenditure above the govern-ment cap. Even those who are aware of how hospitals and companies are failing them have nowhere to go in the absence of a redress mechanism. In the end, civil society organisations have to step into a role the state should have played.

T he Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India had in March itself declared that all

health policies will cover Covid-19 treat-ments but most health policies don’t of-fer any coverage on consumables, usu-ally identified as medical equipment which is discarded after use. Before Co-vid-19, consumables were a minuscule part of hospital bills; now consumables, such as PPE kits and masks, comprise a big chunk. In September, the General Insurance Council, the industry body for non-life insurers and standalone health insurers, appealed to the Supreme Court against exorbitant pricing by hospitals arguing that if lack of transparency in billing continued, it would have a di-rect impact on premium rates, making

insurance policies unaffordable. As it is, insurance reach in India is extremely low with the National Sample Survey in 2018 revealing that over 80 per cent of Indians have no health cover. A study released by the Public Health Founda-tion of India the same year had revealed that out-of-pocket health expenses had driven 5.5 crore Indians into poverty in 2011-2012.

As the bulk of the country’s health-care system has turned its focus to Covid-19 treatment, non-Covid patients are struggling. While a lot of private nursing homes and clinics were shut owing to the pandemic, people are also worried about catching the virus by go-ing to hospital. And those who do make their way to hospital find that they have to pay more for the same services. Those who are seeking admission, quite like Sadhna, have to move from one hospital to another, hoping some luck and a few good contacts will get them a bed.

The pandemic has laid bare the cracks in the Indian healthcare system but AID-AN’s Aisola also believes that Covid-19 could well turn out to be an inflection point for India. “The fact is that there has been no rate regulation in the Indian healthcare industry. Players like insur-ance companies did not play their part well and now they are realising they are being fleeced. [The pandemic] could be a major turning point for bringing in regu-lation. Already more than 20 states have brought in a cap for Covid treatments,” she says. Every time there is a Bill con-cerning hospitals and healthcare, price regulation is the first thing to be dropped. “Bodies like [the Indian Medical Associa-tion] which should have been allies [of patients] work for private hospitals,” she says, referring to the petition filed by the association against the extension of the government cap on Covid treatment prices in Maharashtra. n

Hospitals segregate insured patients by not admitting them under the government cap scheme even as some insurance companies refuse to cover expenditure above the government cap

2 november 202038

In the lanes of Manikonda, one of Hyderabad’s IT-powered suburbs, commercial strips hollowed out by the lockdown are slowly returning to life. The most ubiquitous of the new class of businesses coming to occupy

parts of these empty shopping complexes are clinics. LED boards announce new diagnostic centres and polyclinics, mul-tispeciality practices and old-fashioned physicians. Several medical facilities are under various stages of construction. Buildings with ‘To Let’ signs for their driveways and ground floors indicate a preference for banks and clinics. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

The past six months have disrupted private healthcare in new and unfore-seen ways. On the one hand, Practo and other digital healthcare companies have got physicians to go online and turned the business of diagnostics on its head by aggregating freelance phlebotomists based on their location. On the other, the resource shift from secondary and tertiary care to emergency medicine and Covid management has resulted in a large class of general physicians, specialists in areas relatively unaffected by the virus, and sur-geons whose livelihood largely depends on elective procedures, suddenly finding themselves out of work, underpaid or la-belled non-performers. Some have found new opportunities in the crisis. “At least a dozen new clinics have sprung up in Man-ikonda in the past four months. Rents are low, and physicians without postgradu-ate degrees, or doctors who have lost their jobs, have set up shop in the hope of of-fering affordable secondary care,” says Dr Venkatesh Billakanti, a general prac-titioner who runs Relief Clinic, a two-year-old multispeciality venture in the area. There has been a surge in the number of paediatric and gynaecology OPD cases at

his clinic, he says. “We have seen a trend where patients with minor or routine complaints prefer teleconsults or visit small outpatient setups rather than risk catching the virus at a large hospital. We do not see Covid cases now, but patients who know I see Covid patients at Conti-nental Hospitals, where I am a consultant, are wary of coming to the clinic.”

For well over a decade now, large, so-called corporate hospitals have dominat-ed secondary and tertiary private health-care and added high-end quaternary specialities to their stable of services. To

the smaller hospitals, the independent doctors and the family physicians who had already been eclipsed by glass-and-marble facades and five-star comfort, the Covid crisis has dealt a double blow. But there may yet be a silver lining.

Amidst allegations of overcharging by major hospitals, doctors have spoken out about exploitative practices, ques-tionable ethics, and poor working condi-tions. Some have joined smaller hospitals or braved the odds to start up. “Some of India’s largest hospital chains are trying to force doctors to accept pay-per-service

D o c t o r s J u m p i n g B o r d e r s

I could have waited it out but I didn’t want to. I am at a stage in my career where I am climbing

the ladder. I didn’t want to miss work”Dr Karan Shetty \plastic surgeon

“

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Photograph by pee vee

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 39

rates, essentially turning healthcare into a gig economy,” says a senior gastroenter-ologist at a large Bengaluru multispecial-ity hospital who was summarily taken off payroll and asked to consult for a fraction of the salary she was drawing. In late May, the 53-year-old decided to practise online for the first time, and now sees 10-20 pa-tients a day on video. “I feel used. I helped the hospital build the department. Now it is time to build my own brand. I can afford to take a pay cut, but somewhere, there is a loss of dignity. And that is not acceptable to most senior doctors,” she says. “I have

no intention of settling into the fringes.” In the early stages of setting up a virtual gastroenterology practice along with three former colleagues, two of them from Chennai, she sounds excited, and a little scared.

T he pandemic runs like a dark thread through my conversations with a young cardiologist at a hospital

in Hyderabad who was demoted to para-medic duty, an overworked nephrologist from Chennai who has been demanding a

permanent increase in pay apart from the incentive he received for Covid duty for three months, and an ENT specialist who lost her position as head of the depart-ment at an upcoming hospital in Calicut and took a 75 per cent pay cut to join a clin-ic. Reshmi (last name withheld), 36, says she blames no one for the situation. “The hospital was new and could not afford to pay our salaries. All departments except paediatrics and gynaecology were shut down,” she says. At the ENT clinic, there are few walk-ins despite the fact that it is a preferred referral clinic for many small centres from peripheral towns. “There have been three procedures in the entire month of October so far. But something is better than doing nothing,” she says.

Doctors have to find innovative ways of keeping themselves relevant, says Dr Karan Shetty, 35, speaking to Open at the end of a long working day at his new clinic in Jayanagar, south Bengaluru. “I had four surgeries and OPD,” says the plas-tic, reconstructive and aesthetic surgeon whose spectrum of work ranges from cleft lip surgery and burns to leg and face reconstruction and cosmetic procedures. As work ground to a halt at the hospitals he was consulting at, Dr Shetty turned to his longstanding dream of setting up a surgical centre. “You don’t need an ICU setup for most minor surgeries and cos-metic procedures like liposuction. An outpatient surgical facility could fill the gap in the market that has opened due to the high cost of procedures at corporate hospitals and the fear of contracting the virus there,” he says. With orthopaedic, diabetic foot and wound and gynaecol-ogy consultants sharing the 2,000-sq-ft space with Dr Shetty, Tara Healthcare, named for his mother, has seen over 200 patients in the past month and per-formed 20 surgeries. He has invested

With the disruption in corporate hospitals, underpaid medical professionals and neighbourhood nursing homes are stepping into the breach

By V ShoBa

“When things return to normal, I will continue to consult but I think an independent practice and identity

are essential for specialists todayDr U Vasudeva Rao vascular surgeon

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2 november 202040

Rs 45 lakh in the venture and is hopeful the concept will take off. “Right now, we are riding the surge in interest in botox fillers, liposuction, breast augmentation and other cosmetic procedures. Women now have the opportunity to heal in the privacy of their home,” he says. What made him go independent at a time of uncertainty? “I could have waited it out but I didn’t want to. I am at a stage in my career where I am climbing the ladder. I didn’t want to miss work.”

“There are two sides to how the past half-year has affected doctors—and hos-pitals. OPD and non-Covid admissions fell by over 60 per cent, but handling Covid patients has helped prove that we can provide quality critical care that is also affordable,” says Dr V Suriraju, MD and CEO of Regal Hospitals in Thanisandra, Bengaluru. “As a 100-bedded multispecial-ity hospital, we have been able to survive with five full-time doctors because we always had 35-40 Covid patients at any given time. As we emerge from Covid, we must make use of the goodwill we have earned to cement our position in the industry.”

Retaining doctors has been a chal-lenge for corporate hospitals as well as mid-sized doctor-run hospitals. “About 25 per cent of doctors working in corporate hospitals may come out of this crisis de-taching themselves. Although Covid has given hospitals reason to slash pay and target non-performing doctors, holding on to a cosy job albeit at lesser pay is tempt-ing,” says Dr Jagadish Hiremath, MD, ACE Suhas Hospital, Bengaluru. His hos-

pital decided to go non-Covid-only from October 5th, a conscious decision that has impacted business in the short run. “We have had only three patients so far, but things will turn around by November. There simply isn’t a need for that many Covid beds anymore—regular patients should have access to a safer healthcare environment. And this is where mid-sized hospitals can step up and fill a gap in the market,” he says.

“There has been a lot of movement in core Covid departments,” says Raghaven-dra Reddy, a 32-year-old pulmonologist who recently moved out of Century Hos-pitals, Hyderabad, to a smaller hospital run by the Renova Group for better pay and the opportunity to practise interven-tions. “Many pulmonologists have started their own individual practice aside from being attached to major hospitals. For us, this is a time to learn and to build a brand around ourselves.”

“Many of my patients have been ask-ing if I have an independent outpatient setup,” says Dr U Vasudeva Rao, a vascu-lar surgeon who has been associated with Manipal Hospital, Bengaluru, since 1991. “Physicians can set up a clinic but special-ists like me who joined high-tech modern hospitals for access to the best diagnostic machinery cannot do independent medi-cine any more. The costs are prohibitive, with the initial outlay for a small clinic starting at Rs 1.5 crore,” Dr Rao, 67, says. He is clear that he doesn’t want to be chained to a single corporate hospital ei-ther. Since they are answerable to inves-tors, large hospitals tend not to pass on

benefits to experienced doctors, he says. “Our professional fee, which used to be 25 per cent of the total bill, has dwindled to about 15 per cent.” With the caseload at Manipal dropping drastically, Dr Rao saw opportunity in visiting smaller hospi-tals, but didn’t know who to reach out to. He rounded up five to six associates and colleagues, and together, they decided to launch a group practice, using Medisync, a private healthcare management start-up that helps connect secondary care hospitals in the market with doctors and patients, to find work. “We have worked out a system where we cover seven hospi-tals in Bengaluru between us. We don’t all have to do rounds at every hospital every day—we cover for one another and work as a team. The revenue sharing model, too, works out well.” he says. The basic surgi-cal group has doctors with various levels of experience and it plans to onboard a specialist group of associates who would be brought in for consultation if a case demands it. “When things return to nor-mal, I will continue to consult for Manipal but parallelly, I think that an independent practice and identity are essential for spe-cialists to cultivate today,” Dr Rao says.

M edisync set out to be the Oyo of secondary hospitals in the private sector, says Dr Nagendra Swamy,

the founder and chairman. He describes the two-year-old Sequoia Capital-backed company as a knowledge platform to help neighbourhood hospitals manage and market themselves better. “In India,

“ In India, we keep talking about the need to expand capacity in healthcare

without realising that we have an underutilisation problem”

Dr Nagendra Swamy medical administrator

Cover Story

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 41

we keep talking about the need to expand capacity in healthcare without realising that we have an underutilisation prob-lem. Out of the 16 lakh beds in the coun-try, eight lakh are in the private sector, and less than a lakh of them in corporate-run or large hospitals. Of the remaining seven lakh private beds, only 40 per cent are oc-cupied at any given time. We see opportu-nity in strengthening this segment rather than creating new infrastructure,” says Dr Swamy, who has three decades of experi-ence in corporate healthcare. Large multi-speciality hospitals were built for tertiary care, and yet, they have cornered 60-70 per cent of the secondary care market, he says. “Neighbourhood hospitals are underuti-lised because they are not recognised as a brand. Just like Oyo standardised the mid-dle-class hotel category by ensuring clean rooms and bathrooms, we help smaller hospitals by verifying doctor credentials with the Medical Council, ensuring trans-parent billing, appointing customer care managers to counsel patients, insisting on uniform care for all patients, and encour-aging patients to seek a second opinion if they so wish. The patient can confidently walk into a Medisync hospital and expect standardised care.”

The company has onboarded eight new hospitals since Covid-19 struck—a 50 per cent growth—and introduced them to the digital market by setting up a telemedicine platform. “We have helped them find a new clientele in this time of crisis. We now set up 400-500 digital ap-pointments in a day,” Dr Swamy says. Medisync has 300 doctors onboard, most

of them specialists. It is also helping sur-geons by offering transparent pricing to patients and bringing down costs. “We are trying to restore the family doctor culture across our hospitals. The Covid-19 phase is an opportunity for the private health-care market to reorganise.”

T here has never been a better time for doctors to make themselves valu-able, says Dr Sonal Asthana, an organ

transplant surgeon at Aster CMI Hospital, Hebbal, Bengaluru. He is excited about how the leap in the adoption of telemedi-cine and teleradiology within a short pe-riod of time has changed the way doctors practise. “Even in super-specialities, 70-80 per cent of the work is follow-up, and most of this has moved online. Although there is a short-term pain element, I think this forced acceleration of healthcare re-form is good for patients and doctors in the long run. Doctors are more accessible now, dead time has been eliminated, and costs will come down eventually. Many doctors now have time to think about the direction they would like to take when things normalise,” Dr Asthana says. Aster focused on retaining doctors at a time when most hospitals, large and small, were delivering pay cuts ranging from 25 to 70 per cent. “Hospitals will always need qualified specialists and specialists will need high-quality infra-structure, but post-Covid, this symbi-otic relationship could change in many ways. Hospitals would try to consolidate the gains from the past few months, and groups of doctors would branch out to set up aggregate practices. One thing is for certain: patients will be better off.”

“As hard as it is to run a hospital today, with administration getting increasingly complicated, smaller, doctor-run hospitals that survive the crisis could emerge as net gainers,” says Dr Anil Agadi, whose 44-year-old hospital, started by his father in the heart of Bengaluru, has refused to go corporate. “With fewer people able to afford corporate healthcare post-Covid, and specialists like Dr Rao making time for visits to small hospitals, there is hope.” n

“ “Although there is a short-term pain element, this forced acceleration of healthcare reform is

good for patients and doctors in the long run. Doctors are more accessible now

Dr Sonal Asthana organ transplant surgeon

Upcoming clinics in Hyderabad’s manikonda area

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2 november 202044

hese are days of brinkmanship in Punjab. Less than a month after Parlia-ment passed three farm reform laws, the Punjab Legislative assembly on october 20th passed three bills designed to nullify the Central acts. While the fate of the bills passed in Punjab remains uncertain—they are yet to acquire the governor’s as-sent—their passage represents a spiral of dangerous politics from which the state may find it hard to extricate itself.

“We have made the law, we have to face it. Whether the governor will give the per-mission or not is not known. Then it will go to the President. It is not known whether he will give his assent. But we will fight this,” Chief Minister amarinder singh said in a speech in the state assembly that was high on rhetoric even as it displayed flashes of realism about the economic damage inflicted on Punjab due to the ongoing agitation by farmers there. By singh’s

Politics

By Siddharth Singh

Punjabi raPPolitical brinkmanship in Punjab has taken a dangerous turn after the farm reform laws

chief Minister aMarinder singh’s sPeech in the state asseMbly was high on rhetoric even as it disPlayed flashes of realisM about the econoMic daMage inflicted on Punjab due to the ongoing agitation by farMers there. by singh’s estiMation, the hit suffered by the state aMounts to rs 40,000 crore

t

ani

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 45

estimation, the hit suffered by the state amounts to rs 40,000 crore.

In his speech, singh pleaded with the farmers to back away from the path of agi-tation as he cited the rs 40,000 crore figure. “We have stood with you [farmers]; now you should stand with us [government],” he said even as he promised that his government would get the farmers what is due to them.

Placating the farmers is one spin that can be given to legislative action. But there is a far more visible story unfolding in the state: the fight for primacy between the shiromani akali dal (sad) and the Congress. With the entry of the aam aadmi Party (aaP) into the fray, it was nearly impossible for singh’s government to resist the pressure to take a firm stand against the Central laws.

What is being witnessed in Punjab is a spiral of high-pitched rhetoric and esca-latory political steps that force the main political parties—the sad and the Con-gress—to remain one step ahead of each other. The trouble is that there are only those many twists in that spiral before Punjab gets into a zone of politics that is dangerous and can spin out of control.

on september 17th, Lok sabha passed two farm reform Bills. on the same

day, singh asked, “Why has harsimrat not quit the Modi Cabinet? Why has sukhbir singh Badal not pulled the sad out of the Nda even after the Naren-dra Modi Government failed to address their purported concerns on the farm bills?” By the end of the day, Bathinda MP harsimrat Kaur Badal had quit the Union Cabinet. That evening, she tweeted: ‘I have resigned from the Union Cabinet in pro-test against anti-farmer ordinances and legislation. Proud to stand with farmers as their daughter & sister.’ Nine days later, the akalis quit the National democratic alliance (Nda). Now it was their turn to ratchet up pressure on amarinder singh and the Congress.

even before the sad had left the Nda, sukhbir singh Badal had trained his guns on the Punjab government. on september

24th, he said, “This is the best, the quickest and the most effective way for Punjab to pre-empt the application of the Centre’s latest anti-farmer act in the state because the Centre’s acts do not and will not apply to principal market yards declared by any state government. Therefore, the Punjab government must act without delay.”

The action of october 20th in the state assembly was a direct fallout of this political pressure.

There is more at stake than merely protecting farmers’ interests. The one demand that is strangely out of place is that Minimum support Prices (MsP) for wheat and rice be declared a statutory right. This was suggested by the Chief Minister on the floor of the assembly on october 20th and reiterated by the assembly in the unanimous resolution.

the sad is seeking to claw back the sPace it lost in the 2017 asseMbly elections to the aaP and the congress. since then, the Party has been trying to find soMe eMotive issue that could galvanise its suPPorters or, More accurately, enable it to win theM back

Sukhbir Singh badal and harSimrat kaur badal on a proteSt march in bathinda, September 25

getty iMages

46

The food Corporation of India (fCI) has purchased wheat and rice from Punjab and haryana for decades without any law prescribing MsP for its operations in these two states. When the three reform acts were passed, no less than Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised that MsP would continue. This promise was reiterated by other ministers, including rajnath singh and dharmendra Pradhan. But these promises cut no ice, suggesting that something else is at work behind this demand. This is not hard to fathom.

Punjab’s political problem is not the amarinder singh-led Congress but the discredited sad seeking to claw back the space it lost in the 2017 assembly elections to the aaP and the Congress. This was the first time that Punjab witnessed a three-cornered contest where each contestant had his/her own strengths. In the Malwa region of Punjab, the contest was bitter as this is a stronghold of the sad. The result led to a drubbing for the sad and one of its worst electoral performances since the state was formed. To rub salt into its wounds, the akalis did particularly poorly in Malwa. The aaP and the sad ended up fighting for the same set of votes. There is no way back to power for the sad except by regaining what it has lost in this part of Punjab that accounts for 69 of 117 seats in the assembly. since then, the sad has been trying to find some emotive issue that could galvanise its supporters, or more accurately, enable it to win them back.

Under amarinder singh, an experi-enced politician, the akalis did not get any such opportunity. The two issues that can ignite politics in Punjab are farmers’ liveli-hood and religion. singh said that openly in the assembly on october 20th. The akalis, through their incremental turning of politi-cal screws in Punjab, would like to combine religion and farmers’ issues, making it a deadly cocktail that can potentially sideline the aaP and prove to be a headache for the Congress. In the days after the sad walked out of the Nda, sukhbir singh Badal did make noises about “sikh issues” and “fed-eralism”. These are echoes from the party’s

past when Punjab was a turbulent province.Punjab has a history of such political

fights getting out of hand and engulfing the entire state in a zone of violence. events that led to the lost decade of the 1980s began on a note not very different from what is being heard in Punjab now. Back in 1973, the Congress led by Chief Minister Giani Zail singh was on a strong wicket. a year earlier, the akalis had been beaten decisively in the assembly elections. Zail singh had marshalled religious sentiment

to political ends with unmatched effi-ciency. The Guru Gobind singh Marg—the highway that links shrines associated with the tenth sikh Guru—had been in-augurated by him and he was reaping the symbolic and political benefits associated with the move. It was a bad time for the akali dal—as the sad was then known—and the party was desperately in search of a theme that would allow them to get back into the reckoning.

It was at this point that the anand-

a FarmerS’ proteSt in patiala, october 15

in trying to dissuade farMers froM the Path of agitation, aMarinder singh has clearly deMonstrated his understanding of the dangerous Possibilities inherent in such gatherings. can anyone rule out that a ‘farMers’ issue’ will not MetaMorPhose into a ‘sikh issue’?

Politics

getty iMages

www.openthemagazine.com 47

pur sahib resolution was crafted and launched. The uses of this document—which were to prove ruinous—have an interesting story. There was relative quiet in the months, and even years, after its release in october 1973. This was largely a function of akali efforts to woo the Janata Party at the national level, and this required tactful handling. That paid off. By 1977, the akalis were back in the saddle as the ruling party of Punjab. The trouble began in the early 1980s when the Congress was back in power. That was when the anandpur sahib resolu-tion took on a very different meaning and demands for ‘federalism’ and ‘autonomy’ surfaced with a vengeance.

In those years, especially after 1983, the ruinous effects of political competition based on religion became obvious. While the two parties were busy hurling abuses at each other, an unknown sikh preacher

gained political traction to the point that both parties became irrelevant in Punjab’s politics for a decade. The preacher—Jarnail singh Bhindranwale—was killed in 1984 in the course of military action in amrit-sar. But his poisonous legacy consumed Punjab. The real culprits turned out to be the two main parties in the state, the akali dal and the Congress.

T Is erroNeoUs to say that the past repeats itself with regularity as no two human situa-tions are exact. But what is happening in Punjab

now has alarming similarities with its past. Now that amarinder singh has done what was necessary for keeping his party solvent in state politics, the danger is that the sad and even the aaP may try to go one step further to get political advantage.

To his credit, the Chief Minister re-alises the danger. In trying to dissuade farmers from the path of agitation, he has demonstrated his understanding of the dangerous possibilities inherent in such gatherings. Can anyone rule out that a ‘farmers’ issue’ will not metamorphose into a ‘sikh issue’? The problem is that his political rivals, especially the akalis and the aaP, may not understand that.

The issue in Punjab is one thing, but the problem for the Union Government is of a very different magnitude. It needs to handle Punjab with tact. It has started well by ensuring that rice procurement continues without a hitch, a very power-ful signal to farmers who can comprehend these matters that the Centre won’t leave

them in the lurch. What the BJP needs to be careful about is its former partner, the sad. The moment Punjab politics seems to take a wrong turn, the Centre needs to step in.

There is a bigger problem at hand. Un-less it takes some tough steps, the three farm reform acts will become irrelevant. If it agrees to the resolution passed by Punjab and gives a statutory backing to MsP, this will lead to virtually all states with surplus output demanding the same treatment. That can only lead to unimagi-nable and unbearable financial pressure on the Centre. also, unless the bills passed by Punjab are not vetoed, or kept in cold stor-age at the governor or the President’s level, Congress-ruled states will pass similar laws to neutralise the Central legislation purely on political grounds. (In its 2019 Lok sabha election manifesto, the Congress had prom-ised far more ambitious farm reforms.)

The other, politically and economical-ly more demanding option for the Centre, is to let these Bills pass. In that case, once Punjab is notified as a single market, the fCI can progressively reduce its wheat and rice purchases from Punjab and be-gin developing foodgrain markets in other states. This will not have any detrimental effect on food security in India as Madhya Pradesh and Telangana have enough sur-pluses in wheat and rice, respectively, to handle requirements under the National food security act. But this will be a risky gambit: while it can serve as a warning to other states that might want to ‘do a Pun-jab,’ it may end up creating a major law and order problem in Punjab with the potential of even reviving separatism. What the Centre cannot ignore is the challenge thrown down by Punjab. n

there is More at stake than Merely Protecting farMers’ interests. the one deMand that is strangely out of Place is that MiniMuM suPPort Prices (MsP) for wheat and rice be declared a statutory right. the food corPoration of india has Purchased wheat and rice froM Punjab and haryana for decades without any law Prescribing MsP for its oPerations in these two states

i

2 november 202048

A s t h e l ong days of summer slink into shadowy evenings of fall, there is an urgency

in the air for something that is in-describable. or is it the humdrum of things staying the same? the day changing colours, stark brightness to velvety darkness, is my clock. exist-ing mostly within the rectangularity of my room, I’m aware of the differ-

ence between one day and another. Dully aware? Acutely aware? the time of namaz changes with the season. My workout

varies every day. I read, every few days, more pages of the book I take forever to read. The Haunting of Bly Manor, despite being deliciously tragic and palpably scary, is not a binge-watch as I take three days to finish it. the repeat viewing unfolds newness in corners I didn’t notice, shadows that were people long dead, in explanation of pain that haunted every crack of the gothic manor.

I see something new in everything old. Until something happens that jolts awake in me the realisation that not much changes in the world outside my large window.

one quiet october night, I was a guest via skype on a talk show being aired live on PTV World, giving my oft-repeated points on the short and long-term agenda of the recently formed alliance of eleven major and minor political parties, innocuously termed Pakistan Democratic Movement. the door and window of my room tightly shut to keep the air-con-ditioned silence necessary for the hour-long show, I was all set for a conversation with one host and two guests staring at my own image on the screen. For once, even my two roommates, my dogs Pearl and Autumn, decided to go on the terrace outside my room without barking up any fuss.

A few minutes into the show, I heard a commotion down-stairs. My sister in panicky loudness, my teenage nephew Zain running upstairs and going back in seconds, the dogs barking in-cessantly, and unfamiliar voices, raised, angry, beyond the front door of my house. For the first time in my life, I told a talk show host I had to go because I could hear people shouting at my gate.

shaking, I ran downstairs. Despite being strangely fear-less all my life, the fear of something happening to a loved one makes me go into a trembling mode. Until I start to ex-hale. When I reached the gate, there was a group of people shouting so angrily, I thought Zain had got into a fight with someone on the road. the group of shouting strangers had a grey-haired older man in a white shalwar kameez, a man in a

black shalwar kameez in his 20s, presumably, a woman in her 60s, a teenager in shorts and a tee, two domestic staff members, one old, one young. there were more, I forgot them even as they crowded very close to me.

As they shouted, I tried to make sense of what they were say-ing. they were from a house a few houses from ours, on the other side of the road. Apparently, they had an issue with the silencer of Zain’s heavy motorbike, and they had talked to him a few days ago. the elderly woman, sister of the elderly man, was unwell, and the sound of Zain’s motorbike disturbed her. Zain had agreed to drive at slow speed outside their house, and the matter was solved. Clearly, it hadn’t.

enraged at the sound of his motorbike as he drove past the brother-sister duo walking on the road, they went to their house, gathered more of their folks, and stormed to our house. to physi-cally beat up a teenager?

As I tried to calm them down, saying to them that I had to stop shaking before I talked to them, I reached out and grasped, briefly, the hands of the older and younger men. In Pakistan, fe-males don’t hold hands of strange men. I did, to reassure them that I was listening to them. Fuming, they paid little attention to anything I said or did. they accused Zain of unleashing Pearl on them, my seven-year-old mixed breed who lives in my room and hates strangers. In a matter of minutes, I found out that one of them had slapped, repeatedly, my domestic staff member nasir. that was when I got really, really angry.

nasir is like a family member. one of his two children, eight-year-old Baku, the name I gave him, is in my room all day long. he even sleeps on my couch. nasir’s daughter and wife are in their village for a few days. he told me that the neighbours stormed to our house, kicked our gate, stepped into the short driveway, shouted at being attacked by a dog that merely barks and angrily sniffs strangers, and slapped nasir without even giving him a chance to speak. Zain told me that as he drove past them, the man tried to push him off the motorbike. I was enraged.

When they said to me that the sound of Zain’s motorbike both-ered them, my immediate reaction was an apology and a reassur-ance that it wouldn’t happen again. Without even going into the details of the conversation they’ve had with Zain earlier, I gave them my word that his motorbike wouldn’t be a source of distur-bance to their invalid family member. they kept shouting, they kept looking at Zain and me as if we had done great harm to them. I stopped caring about their anger as soon as I found out what they had done to nasir. I asked them to apologise to him. they refused.

the older man started to walk in the direction of his house, shouting, “Mera pastol lao.” (bring my pistol). he didn’t care who

Land without SmaLL mercieSThe social and emotional inequalities of Pakistan come out in small anecdotes

LeTTer from Lahore

By mehr tarar

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 49

heard him. I asked loudly what he needed his gun for. “I’m going to shoot that dog,” he answered pointing to Pearl sitting quietly at the terrace. now I was so angry I knew I had to do something.

Zain had called the police emergency number 15. shortly after my useless talk with the fuming neighbours, four Dolphin personnel arrived on their official police motorbikes. the Dolphin squad of lahore is part of the Punjab Police that is mandated “to respond to emergencies within a timely manner and to assist Capital City Police in ending street crimes.” they listened to the two sides, us in front of our gate, them in front of their house.

Us was me, a woman; Zain, a teenager; nasir, our domestic staff member, “servant” in the terminology of almost every Paki-stani; and my two dogs, watching us quietly from the terrace after having calmed down, grudgingly, by the din at the gate.

the Dolphins were impeccably behaved, respectful, helpful. they listened, patiently, and stayed there for as long as I didn’t go inside my house.

I stayed outside my gate. on the street. I refused to go back in-side. I was not going to let go of what they had done to nasir even if I could bring myself to overlook how they had behaved with Zain.

Another neighbour came to talk to me. the self-proclaimed mediator of the feuds of the neighbourhood. sharing with me that he was part of the group that talked to Zain a few days ago, and the courteousness of that conversation, his advice to me was to calm down and forgive and forget the whole thing. Agreeing to his suggestion of the pointlessness of prolonging a solvable issue, I said that I would let it go if they apologised to nasir.

I told the police that I felt unsafe, my family felt unsafe, my dogs were unsafe, and that I was going to file a police case against the bunch of men who didn’t even have the decency to give a sincere apology to a poor man

I l lustration by Saurabh Singh

2 november 202050

More time passed. People driving by stared. some slowed down. some stopped to ask me what had happened. the concern of two young men and a young woman in a White toyota land Cruiser was noteworthy. they talked to my nephew, gave him their phone number, and said to us that we could call them at any time if there was any issue. Insisting that Zain had not commit-ted any crime just riding his motorbike, they said that we should have never said sorry to the angry neighbours.

After talking to the neighbours, the two Dolphin cops convinced them to render an apology. two men arrived, the 20s one in black shalwar kameez, and probably his older brother or cousin. Flippant, sardonic, the younger one apologised to nasir. I could see what he was doing. the sham apology to avoid a police report. It was the older man, probably in his 40s, who spooked me.

GlArIng At ZAIn, he said, “Who unleashed the dog on my parents?” he recoiled when I went close to him,

trying to tap him on his shoulder to talk to him. As if I was a person of a low caste trying to touch someone of a high caste. My attempt to clarify that no one had attacked his parents went unheard. he walked away without listening to me. I asked him again. he refused to even stop. Why would he listen to the explanation of a woman? he had come there to “settle a score” with a teenager, while his brother or cousin offered his fake apology to a “servant.”

his demeanour was insulting. It was also scary. In our home, it is my sister and Zain and me and nasir’s family. My brother-in-law works in saudi Arabia. My son studies in new York. the

absence of ‘the man of the house’ made us vulnerable. I made a call to the police for an officer to be sent to my house.

then I started to make phone calls. I texted someone, a very, very important person in the province. My lucky night, he was online. A few minutes later, I received a call from his office. A few minutes later, a high-level police officer called me. A few minutes later, another police officer called me. And a few minutes later, another police officer called me. In a matter of minutes, an entire chain of command came into action.

It was after 11 pm. I sat on the grass outside the house in front of ours. nasir and Zain didn’t leave my side. nasir finally got me a chair from my sister’s living room. I waited for the police.

And then the police officer, an AsP, in command of my residential area, arrived. he was the last phone call. Masked, accompanied by his team, he listened to the entire story. I asked him to verify the story with the guards and the drivers and the cooks standing outside our other neighbours’ homes. they knew nasir and had seen and heard the entire thing. I told him about the attempt to push Zain off the motorbike, their kicking of the gate of my house, entering my house, slapping a man who had not said a word to them, the threat to shoot my dog, the menacing tone of the man in his 40s.

My stance was unambiguous by that time: I told the police that I felt unsafe, my family felt unsafe, my dogs were unsafe, and that I was going to file a police case against the bunch of men who didn’t even have the decency to give a sincere apology to a poor man.

the night silence deepened. Cars stopping to ask what was go-ing on became fewer. the entire stretch from our house to theirs was now full of the vehicles of the police and DhA (our residen-tial area) security personnel. the police officer went to talk to

LeTTer from Lahore

A Dolphin Force police squad in Lahore

The Punjab Police were extremely efficient. Even the ones who had arrived without the orders of a very, very important person. Immaculately behaved, they listened, showed empathy, advised, offered to help in any way my family and I needed help. They promised more patrolling of our street, of the stretch of the ‘incident’

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 51

the angry, unrepentant neighbours. their voices were different when they talked to him. no longer were they flippant or sar-donic or threatening. suddenly, they were well-behaved men of a decent family who had got into a fight out of their concern for the wellbeing of the woman of their family. Zain and nasir were there for a little while during the police officer’s questioning. they saw the neighbours changing their tone, their demeanour.

the officer told me that he had lis-tened to both sides. Incredulous, I said that there were no sides. I said I wished to file a formal report. one officer took out a notepad and a pen.

the grey-haired bearded man came to talk to me. I didn’t think it was a willingly taken action. But I listened to him with respect. one police officer said that the sound of Zain’s motorbike was not an issue to anyone other than people who were unwell. the AsP’s subordinate said that while Zain had not done any-thing wrong, our neighbours entering our house, slapping nasir and threaten-ing to use a gun—all crimes.

reassuring the neighbour gentle-man that Zain’s motorbike would not cause any disturbance to his ailing sister, I wished him and his family well. We said goodnight with big smiles. I know mine was sincere. I decided not to think too much about his.

the Punjab Police were extremely efficient. even the ones who had arrived without the orders of a very, very important person. Immaculately behaved, they listened, showed empathy, advised, offered to help in any way my family and I needed help. they promised more patrolling of our street, of the stretch of the “incident”.

two hours had passed. I walked into my room. My laptop reposed in a long-ended talk show on skype. My dogs welcomed me as if I had returned after a full day. Baku barely looked up from his nintendo switch.

In 2020, the world turned upside down by Covid-19, Pakistan undergoing myriad issues of inflation, and the united opposition’s efforts to topple the government, young and old people dying everywhere in the world, flakiness of life becoming the glaring concreteness of existence, some things remain unchanged. the unchangeability is etched in words and actions that seem to shift form with a fluidity that is paradoxical to their very existence. things that are etched are permanent until someone rubs dirt over them, until a sharp thing erases

them, until time diminishes them. the patriarchy, the boxes of gender, the dynamics of class

and privilege. What is to do and how to do it, there is barely any clarity despite the reality of some very clear-cut rules. the rules that decide who is to be treated in which manner versus the mindsets that judge who is to be treated in which manner.

In 2020, what remains unchanged is the vulnerability. Despite the noise about equality of rights of all humans, fights for gender equality, protests for cruelty against animals, police becoming more vigilant, it is still an unsafe world for the underprivileged, women, teenagers, animals.

those two hours on the road outside my house that october night. I knew. I felt alone. I felt scared. My world, despite being privileged, is still unsafe for nasir and Zain and Pearl and me. n

Mehr Tarar is a well-known Pakistani columnist and author

In 2020, what remains unchanged is the vulnerability. Despite the noise about equality of rights of all humans, fights for gender equality, protests for cruelty against animals, police becoming more vigilant, it is still an unsafe world for the underprivileged, women, teenagers, animals

A protest ahead of International Women’s Day in Karachi, March 6 reuterS

2 november 2020

Beholden to the Fat her Figure

salo

ncinema

Photo alamy

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 53

BEHOLDEN TO THE FAT HER FIGURE Sofia Coppola’S

new film iS a father-daughter buddy movie. the direCtor talkS to

rajeev maSand about her departure

from refleCtive CharaCter StudieS

well after midnight for me here in India when Sofia Coppola connects, via Zoom, from her home in New York. Dressed in a crisp white shirt and sipping from a glass of what appears to be iced tea, she’s in no rush to talk shop. She apologises that the time difference means we have to do this so late my time. She enquires about my Star Wars fixation when she spots a Darth Vader figurine on the shelf behind me. And although I suspect she wouldn’t mind if I spent at least a few minutes of the time allocated for this interview talking about my favourite among the films she’s made (Somewhere, 2010), it seems only fair that we get on with the subject du jour–her seventh and latest film On The Rocks, which begins streaming globally on Apple TV+ from October 23rd.

For On The Rocks Coppola reunited with her Lost in Translation star Bill Murray whom she first directed 17 years ago. That film, a moody melancholic piece about two strangers who meet in a foreign land and find sanctuary in their brief encounter, won the then 32-year-old writer-director an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It’s also regarded as a modern masterpiece of sorts; a smart, poignant film that captured the zeitgeist when it first came out, and one whose legion of fans continues to grow as younger generations discover it.

The new film is a departure from Coppola’s oeuvre of reflective character studies. It stars Rashida Jones as an author and mother of two young girls in New York who’s struggling to find her rhythm so she can bang out the new book she’s contracted to write. Preoccupied with the niggling suspicion that her husband (Marlon Wayans) may be having an affair with a colleague, she reluctantly allows her father (Murray), a charming playboy with devil-may-care charisma, to persuade her into spying on him. Before long father and daughter are reconnecting over drinks, discussing life and relationships, and setting off on car chases as they stalk her husband in search of the truth.

From as soon as the plot of the film was revealed there has been talk that the story is autobiographical, or at the least that Murray’s dashing, larger-than-life charmer Felix is based on her own father, the Oscar-winning legend Francis Ford Coppola. It’s a ‘charge’ that she

It’s

2 november 202054

admits to, but only in part. “There are moments, but the character is inspired as much by other people of my parents’ generation—my father-in-law, family friends, friends of my dad,” she says.

She also accepts that the film is a change of pace from her style. “I was at a point in my life when I was looking to do something that was fun, but it still had to say something. And it had to be in my style,” she explains. The resulting effort is a film that examines how two different generations (and genders) look at love, relationships and marriage. It is structured like something of a father-daughter buddy movie and unfolds like an adventure of sorts in bars, restaurants and the busy streets of Manhattan. But there are moments of introspection, heartbreak and solitude that feel closer to Coppola’s signature. It’s a slick, stylish film about privileged folks and their problems, some might even say, but it seldom rings untrue.

Excerpts from the conversation:You’ve said that in your twenties you’d often sit down with your father and have conversations about life over a drink. It’s one of the things that inspired the relationship between Bill’s and Rashida’s characters in this film. Has your father seen the movie?Yes, my dad saw it and appreciated it. He’s not a bon vivant in the way that the character is, but of course there are elements of him, and I think he appreciated the attention (laughs).

You’ve said Rashida’s character Laura is an extension of you.Well, it’s not a self-portrait, but it’s a lot of little personal things I was thinking of.

Most of your films—The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Somewhere (2010), Marie Antoinette (2006)—tend to be more reflective, less ‘wordy’.

That was one of the big things. Usually in my films there are feelings under the surface, things not said. But I wanted there to be more of a dialogue. I wanted the characters to be able to talk about their emotions and their feelings but without sounding corny. It was a challenge because it was new for me at the screenplay stage.

For the longest time you resisted working with Bill again for fear of tarnishing the affection people had for Lost in Translation. It’s a good thing you got over it because it’s hard to think of another actor who could play this character without him coming off as

unlikeable. How does he do it?He’s just a unique force of nature. But he has so much heart and sincerity so it helped a lot with the role, which can be complicated because anyone that’s very charming and charismatic usually has a dark too, and he was able to bring just so much joyfulness and heart. He’s so lovable; he’s just a unique creature.

How has your relationship with him changed since Lost in Translation?

It has, because I’d just met him during Lost in Translation and I was young and starting my career at the time. But now we know each other, and Bill has trust and respect for me as a work collaborator. So it was really fun because we just know each other better, and he and Rashida knew each other so we could all work together.

The scene where Bill and Rashida are tailing a cab in a noisy convertible is the one played for broad laughs—not something you do often in your films. Does straightforward comedy require you to apply a different muscle from the one you’re generally use?

Yes, definitely. I think you always want to push yourself and do something you haven’t done or you’re not as familiar with. So I was really glad to have Rashida and Bill help me with that, and to try and do something in a more comedic tone, but then that they could put their more heartfelt, serious side in as well.

I know it’s hard to shoot in cars but I couldn’t help it because it lent itself to the story. And it was fun to do

the car chase. I kept talking about it as our action sequence—which it hardly is—but luckily I had a lot of help with that. And Bill’s a great driver, so that helped.

You only completed the film a few months ago. But it already makes one nostalgic for a world that we knew so well: for a time when people were in the streets going about their lives normally and bars were crowded and restaurants were busy. Does that hit hard? Does it feel like another lifetime?Oh definitely. We only shot it last summer but it feels like a long time ago. And it makes me feel a little melancholic. I hope it’s nice for people to see it, and because we can’t travel and do these things now I hope it’s fun to be in New York with Bill and Rashida. n

cinema

i was really glad to have rashida and Bill do

something in a more comedic tone, and they could put

their more heartFelt, serious side in as well

Sofia Coppola director

rashida jones and bill murray in On the rOcks

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The beauty of the written word; a story well told.The luxury of immersing myself in myriad lives; journeying to faraway lands.I am obsessed. And the Reviews in Open help me discover the best.A quiet corner. An interesting book. Life’s good!

Sanjay Malik, Dubai

2 november 202056

Parvathy is done with the whataboutery of the Kerala film industry. The straightshooting actor shares her hopes and frustrations with Ullekh NP

The Tide is shifTing AwAy from mAle supremAcy in movies

cinema interview

Courtesy Aum ThiruvoTh

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 57

arvathy thiruvothu, popularly known by her screen name Parvathy, is an outspoken and well-read feminist known for her roles in multiple south indian languages and in Bollywood where

she had starred in Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017) alongside the late irrfan Khan. her most popular films include Poo (tamil, 2008), Take Off (Malayalam, 2017), Uyare (Malayalam, 2019) and Virus (Malayalam, 2019). recently, the award-winning actor quit the nodal actors’ body of the Malayalam film industry, association of Malayalam Movie artists (aMMa), over a derogatory remark by the general secretary of the organisation about a fellow fe-male Malayalee actor. Kerala, feted for its high social indices, has often incurred the wrath of feminists over its toxic masculinity on and off screen.

undeterred by rape threats and cyberstalking, the likes of Parvathy, who is part of Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), are leading a crusade against the scourge which often brings them face-to-face with big names in the industry. “For me they are not superstars unless they also have a moral compass,” says 32-year-old Parvathy. She spoke to Open from the sets of a short film she is shooting, along with an untitled movie directed by Sanu varghese. Excerpts from the interview.

When did you start feeling that AMMA does not stand up for the rights of its female members?Ever since the incident happened in February 2017 [when a leading female ac-tor in Kerala was abducted and allegedly raped]. i found their ‘support’ to be rather performative than holding any value to help the survivor. that really con-founded me. three members resigned as members of aMMa in protest against this injustice, including the survivor, but i, Padmapriya and revathi stayed back as a strategy to fight on.

We went through the bylaws of aMMa. We went for its executive committee [EC] meeting which was, in hindsight, a big drama to ensure that we as well as the media kept quiet for a while. We wanted them to request the survivor to return to its fold. We also had questions about the bylaws and about the internal complaints committee [to probe sexual harassment at the workplace]. We kept writing emails to them and they never responded. the next thing we knew was the president and a few EC members organised a press conference where they said the survivor needed to apply for a membership in aMMa in order to come back. and so, we decided to go into the general body meeting with the same set of questions. We realised that 90 per cent of the members had no clue that the EC was going to redraft the bylaws which were atavistic and they were going to make them more regressive. Essentially, more powers would be vested

with the EC, making the general body almost toothless. out of 15 members of the EC, only three were women.

two of the male EC members are legislators in the Kerala assembly. they speak from such power that only some five-six of us at the general meeting asked questions. We got up to speak and found a slot to make our voices heard, even as aMMa was almost close to passing the new amendments to the bylaws without any voting. thanks to our intervention, they had to freeze that move.

Since that day we had told them we are ready to work with them, with our lawyers on our side, and form a committee for bylaw amendments. But as expected there was radio silence after that.

Did the AMMA general secretary make the statement, which triggered your exit from AMMA, about the actress herself or was it about the character she was going to play in a movie (that “she

is dead now”)? Is there any confusion?there is no confusion. i watched the video so many times before i made my decision. i wanted to be sure. What he said is completely out of line.

You always enunciate each letter in the acronym AMMA instead of pronouncing it ‘Amma’. Why?it is dishonourable to use the word ‘amma’ [mother] for the organisation. they are the most regressive and anti-women organisation that i have found on every count. i call it a-M-M-a because people need to see it is an organisation and stop putting it on a pedestal that it doesn’t deserve.

How far have things changed in the industry since the early days of your acting career?i have far more hope that things are going to change now than when i joined the industry. Back then, i had zero hope. it was incredibly male-dominated and it wasn’t even discussed openly. there was a strange pattern that women were never allowed to huddle together. there were production controllers and the way they would speak about an actress to another used to be very derogatory. We came to know much about all this after we came together as WCC. We never knew there was an underlying plan to stop us from interacting closely, to ensure that we don’t share our secrets and experiences. i feel we were all floating little islands until WCC came together.

Nevertheless, i was vocal about me reading the script before signing on. they used to ridicule me for that. they used to ask questions like, ‘oh you will only read the script and say yes?’ it was as if it was not the right of an individual to ask to read the script to know what task lay ahead of them. they treat women as if they have no agency of their own. Newcomers are made

p

It Is dIshonourable to use the word ‘amma’ for the

organIsatIon. they are the most regressIve and antI-women

organIsatIon that I have found on every count. I would call It

a-m-m-a because people need to see It Is an organIsatIon and stop

puttIng It on a pedestal that It doesn’t deserve ”

Parvathy actor

2 november 202058

to feel they were being offered a favour by producers and direc-tors by hiring them for a movie.

Many male actors blame female AMMA members for being selective in their outrage — that is, people complain only when it suits them. What is your response?there is a good word for it: whataboutery. Basically, they need to be called out for their whataboutery. the onus is on them to answer this, not us. i have seen a lot of women do it too. i don’t even want to dignify such statements. there are so many ways in which they would try and digress from the issues at hand.

You have called out some big names for their misogyny.yes, i have called out a few idols that have been created out of hu-man beings who are as flawed as any other person. it is strange that you can pick and choose where and when you glorify them. you can talk highly of their superhit movies. But what about their basic moral responsibility? if there is gross injustice at their own workplace and they are quiet about it, they are enablers. Period.

What is the state government doing about it?i would like to voice out my disappoint-ment over the delay by the Kerala govern-ment in placing the report of the Justice hema Commission [appointed two years ago to study gender discrimination in the Kerala film industry]. WCC is the one that sought this commission. the recom-mendations have been made, but it is not yet in the public domain. We understand this is Covid time, but we have to make sure there is a preventive and prohibitive mechanism. Why are those recom-mendations still in cold storage after a lot of time and money has gone into the creation and running of the commission? We need a tribunal in place. or else, more women are going to drop complaints for want of redress mechanisms. this wouldal-low criminals to terrorise them with absolute impunity.

Is your Collective (WCC) a cohesive entity?of course, there are differences of opinion. WCC is full of people who are from a varied range who work in various departments in the film industry. We strive for healthy debates and discus-sions. We call it sisterhood, yes, but we don’t want to put it on a pedestal where some of us cannot be touched or questioned. We are disruptors, we are whistleblowers, but we are also a support system. We are supportive of every member in the film industry who is willing to make the change along with us. our core belief is that we are here for equal spaces, equal opportunities and we want to be treated with basic human dignity. We at WCC have come from different notions of feminism and we have evolved

over the past three years in our understanding of it. We are look-ing to speak the truth and move forward together.

What is your idea of feminism and how has it evolved?My idea of feminism used to be the very basic idea of it which is about holding equal spaces for everybody so that there can be freedom to make a choice without any conformist ideas pushing them to make that choice. that notion itself has not changed, but by being part of WCC and with the help of my closest friends i have come to realise one cannot overlook the core part of feminism: intersectionality. Feminism is not something that can be applied in the same way for each person because of their economic, social and political backgrounds. the more conversations i have with fellow women, the more i am able to understand their perspectives. it has led me to understand my own privilege and how that has enabled me to do and be so many things. that is not the case for those who go through casteist oppression or are harassed based on their

sexual orientations and gender.

Can you elaborate on your privilege?i was born and raised in an upper-class hindu family. that cushions a lot of the blows . i did not recognise the cushion-ing i had until i started working with WCC and started listening to others. i have strongly felt that to a really great extent, the justice i have received often is because of my skin colour, my caste and so on. there are women who stand to lose because of lack of that privilege.

You are up against formidable powers. How do you plan to go ahead? What is it that makes them formi-dable? it comes with a certain structure from which they have benefited by oppressing others. that is the power

structure that i would like to break. that is an ongoing process. We have the same agency as any other person. there is a façade of niceness and we do not want to be part of it. i plan to con-tinue to work, produce and direct movies, and aid and facilitate moviemakers who are trying to make a change. the strongest way to make change is actually by making a very good connec-tion with the people by giving them quality content. that is what i am very focused on at the moment. i don’t think the market changes all this just on its own. i think we have the power to change the market. We are figur-ing a way out. People who are likeminded are coming together. that an all-encompassing power structure is irreplaceable is a myth. the tide is shifting already. the age-old oppressor structure will be replaced. ott [over-the-top or streaming media service] opens up a lot of opportunities for us. in time we will have a far more concrete plan in place. n

women In cInema collectIve Is full of people who are from a varIed range who work In

varIous departments In the fIlm Industry. we are dIsruptors, we are whIstleblowers, but we are also a support system. our core

belIef Is that we are here for equal spaces, equal opportunItIes

and we want to be treated wIth basIc human dIgnIty”

Parvathy

cinema interview

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cinema essay

The InvIsIble OTherWhat makes us who we are? Increasingly in popular culture it is who we are opposed toBy Kaveree Bamzai

aran Johar may well have given Prime minister narendra modi a written undertaking that he, and other filmmakers of note, would be making ‘inspiring content’ to celebrate 75 years of Independence in 2022. But for that directors will first have to decide what this content is to be and which national identity will it acknowledge. Will it be, as it has been in the past few decades, only in opposition to the other, which keeps changing over time, or will it be an affirmation of the many identities we all carry, caste, class, religion and gender? Call it the fear of small numbers or the psychic tyranny of the minority, the national identity is posited in opposition to a specifically defined community.

If it was the homosexual man in a repressed society, it became the Western/Westernised woman in a newly inde-pendent India trying to find its own imprimatur. of late, as society becomes increasingly divided, the Indian muslim, or his sympathiser, has to bear the brunt of solidifying the notion of nationalism, whether it is movies such as Tanhaji (2020) or ads such as the recent Tanishq promotion where a hindu woman married into a muslim family was dubbed love jihad and trolled on social media.

at different points in our history, hindi cinema has served different ends. The nehruvian consensus of the 1950s made way for a certain exploration and adventure in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of independent women. The unease with them usually manifested in their representation as either vaguely anglo-Indian such as helen’s dancer character in Teesri Manzil (1966), who is blonde and fair unlike the heroine asha Parekh,

K

saif ali khan in tanhaji

The IndIan MuslIM, or hIs syMpa ThIser, has To bear The brunT of solIdIfyIng The noTIon of naTIonalIsM, wheTher IT Is MovIes such as TanhajI (2019) or ads such as The recenT TanIshq proMoTIon

2 november 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 61

or like anita, in Deewar (1975), whose first appearance is clad in a slinky dress, smoking and making the first move on the hero. Both get shot because of their proximity to the hero, which ac-cording to film scholar Geetanjali Gangoli, is one way of resolv-ing the fascination of the colonised Indian man for the coloniser. Equating the Western/Westernised woman with vamp/prosti-tute was both an act of defiance and cultural superiority.

In the case of actual white women, beginning with the gener-ous Elizabeth of Lagaan (2001), who is said to have remained unwed all her life like radha as a tribute to the love of her life, Bhuvan, the attitude was quite different. This was echoed in Rang De Basanti (2006) as well, when alice Patten’s passionate film student is forever in love with the memory of DJ (aamir Khan). It spoke of a newfound sense of confidence of the country’s place in the world, even though the Indian man was never quite united with the white woman, she remained deeply connected to him in her lifetime.

Women’s sexuality remained problematic and there was enormous discomfort with the emergence of the unwed mother. If in Dhool Ka Phool (1959), yash Chopra’s directorial debut, a scared mala Sinha abandons her illegitimate child in a forest, by 1978, Waheeda rahman raises her child by herself, ask-ing for nothing from the tycoon lover who abandoned her. That it leaves a permanent scar on their son, Vijay, who spends the rest of the film trying to avenge his mother’s dishonour suggests there was still latent ambiguity about something that movies such as Kundan Shah’s Kya Kehna (2000) and r Balki’s Paa (2009) made most acceptable.

Dinesh Bhugra, Professor of mental health at King’s College, London, believes national identity has changed over the years in reference to the other. “I am male because you are female. I am sane because you are insane. The creation of the other is both social and personal and a result of prejudices and long-held beliefs,” he says. over the years, the other has been manifested in various ways. In the sixties, films such as Dosti (1964) and Sangam (1964) showed sublimated homosexuality. While Dosti showed the love between ramu and mohan, who had the added disadvantage of physical disability, Sangam, many have argued, was an extended friendship between the characters played by raj Kapoor and rajendra Kumar, with Vyjayanthimala’s character coming between them. Even in Kal Ho Na Ho (2003), it could well be that Preity Zinta’s character was extraneous to the relationship between the characters of aman (Shah rukh Khan) and rohit (Saif ali Khan). and of course, aman had to die. nikkhil advani, the director, says there was no mystery to it. “It was the idea of everlasting love, living on even after death.” It was not until Dostana, in 2008, that a gay couple made it to mainstream hindi cinema, albeit in a comical way.

In the seventies, with the rise of women in the public do-main, the westernised woman took the place of the vamp. often the westernised woman would be eliminated from the screen, as was anita in Deewar. at other times, she was rapidly Indian-ised through the change in her clothing within the same film. The trend continued in the ’80s and early ’90s, with Sridevi and madhuri Dixit often carrying within their screen characters this conflict between modernity and tradition. It could be Sridevi

the tanishq ad where a hindu woman marries into a muslim family

The IndIan MuslIM, or hIs syMpa ThIser, has To bear The brunT of solIdIfyIng The noTIon of naTIonalIsM, wheTher IT Is MovIes such as TanhajI (2019) or ads such as The recenT TanIshq proMoTIon

2 november 202062

playing anju and manju in Chaalbaaz (1989), the meek and smart twins who look out for each other and are the ultimate male fantasy. It could be Ganga in Khalnayak (1993) who is as much seductress as a police officer devoted to her ram.

The rise of terror in India, with the Babri masjid demolition and the consequent serial bomb blasts in mumbai in 1992-1993 also saw the rise of a powerful other—the ‘bad’ muslim. Until recently the ‘bad’ or misguided muslim would always be bal-anced by the ‘good’ muslim whether it was Sarfarosh (1999) or Fanaa (2006). So for every Gulfam hassan, muhajir ghazal singer maddened by the Partition, a line drawn by an Englishman in the sand, there is a Zooni in Fanaa who thinks nothing of shoot-ing down the father of her child because he is a traitor.

But of late hindi cinema has decided demonisation is the bet-ter part of displaying diversity. Cut to alauddin Khilji’s represen-tation in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat (2018), where the muslim ruler is seen beheading his father-in-law, tearing into his chicken and generally behaving like Khal Drogo’s offspring. Unlike the domesticated akbar of Jodhaa Akbar (2008), Khiljji is shown as a brutal invader who can never unite with his queen, who chooses mass jauhar over dishonour.

EVEn ThaT IS not enough in these divided times. Those who work for the mughals find themselves

painted in the same brush, literally in the case of Uday Bhan rathod in Tanhaji (2019), who wears all black, throws hot water on prisoners, relishes crocodile meat and thinks nothing of dis-membering elephants. all this while a clearly foreign-looking aurangzeb clicks his knitting needles and dreams of capturing the whole of hindustan.

movies such as Mulk (2018) have shown a greater complexity of the muslim experience, from the law-abiding police officer to the staunch secularist patriarch to the angry young militant. But it is a narrative that does not fit in with the hindutva idea of the other. Little surprise then that the invisibilisation of the muslim may well be the next step, as is evident from the outcry over the recent Tanishq ad which showed a muslim family conducting

a traditional baby shower for their hindu daughter in law. a savage response by right wing trolls got the jewellery brand to pull the ad. In Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2020), both the muslim characters, osman and Shazia, end up shot dead. Says writer-director alankrita Shrivastava of osman’s death: “From the moment he was born in my thoughts, he emerged as a character who would die at the end. and his death would be a catalyst for Dolly to finally free herself. I think there is a deep cynicism that has set in inside of me. We are no longer a country where religious divisions don’t matter. We are a majoritarian society now. The dark polarisation of society stares us in the face, and we can’t escape it.” Indeed, a Surf Excel ad in 2019 that had a young girl protecting her muslim friend from getting splattered with colours met with the same kind of hostility online as the Tanishq ad, shrinking the space for multiculturalism onscreen.

not every community that has long been ‘othered’ by Bol-lywood has done so badly. The community broadly known as hijras or transgenders has slowly emerged from the shadows in hindi cinema, as indeed they have in real life, with the Supreme Court recognising them as transgenders in 2014. a study of 29 films by Gurvinder Kalra and Dinesh Bhugra divided the representation into five categories: hijras as figures of fun, pass-ing references, sociocultural puppets, as villains and as sensitive mothers. The study suggested that there was a paradigm shift in their move from the margins to the mainstream, as in the forthcoming Laxmmi Bomb, starring akshay Kumar.

Dalits, in a string of movies from the scathing Court (2014) by Chaitanya Tamhane to the witty Serious Men, directed by Sudhir mishra, find themselves represented as the oppressed. But a community that refuses to be defined by defeatism. The poet in Court does not accept the ludicrous argument that his song lured the manual scavenger to kill himself, while in Serious Men, ayyan mani sees his own caste status interwoven with his class and wants to find the quickest way from 2G to 4G, a generation which has sweated so much that its offspring can live in comfort through their lifetime. Because nothing establishes an Indian’s identity than wealth. It is one marker that overcomes all diversi-ties and disparities. n

The unease wITh IndependenT woMen usually ManIfesTed In TheIr represenTaTIon as vaguely anglo-IndIan such as helen’s dancer characTer In TeesrI ManzIl (1966), who Is blonde and faIr unlIke The heroIne asha parekh

helen in teesri manzil

cinema essay

www.openthemagazine.com 632 november 2020

books

In a world far removed from now, the first Malayalam film was produced and released in erstwhile

Travancore on october 23rd, 1930. But what was the beginning of a great history, the first screening of Vigathakumaran (lost Child) at the Capitol Cinema Hall in Trivandrum, ended in disaster for some.

The first heroine of Malayalam cinema, PK rosy, was forced to flee her hometown, Trivandrum, in the ruckus raised by the casteist forces. Because, she was an untouchable, a dalit, playing the role of an upper-caste woman in the mov-ie. She was already a pioneer in taking on female roles in the folk form Kakkaarissi and had had her setbacks there too.

She was never heard of again. when Vinu abraham, a writer of

short fiction in Malayalam, stumbled on this piece of ignored history of Malayalam cinema, he was intrigued enough to chase the tale of the ‘lost Heroine’. Some material compiled by dedicated researchers was available but it had more gaps than information. and not even a mugshot of the lady was to be found. But the story of rosy, by then, demanded to be document-ed in fiction. and Vinu abraham admits he understood the need for liberal doses of imagination to complete his mission.

The novel Nashta Nayika (lost Heroine) came out in 2008, and since then, rosy’s story has fused into the Keralan culture-o-scope, both aurally and visually. The biggest take-off of the novel was, perhaps, the movie Celluloid (2013), which collected awards galore. a delectable and fully justi-fied English translation of Nashta

Nayika (2020), by CS Venkiteswaran and arathy ashok, brings the story of PK rosy to the non-Malayali audience.

The well-preserved sense of ‘local’, and the light and non-intrusive ap-proach to translation works well. The style of multiple translators is worked seamlessly into the text.

The innate culture of a language has its subtexts which can be lost in transla-tion. alternatively, this is seen adapted suitably into the tapestry of the target language. It’s the translator’s challenge to keep a fine balance. a ‘literal’ trans-lation, where one ‘hears’ the original tongue, does bear the risk of the text sounding awkward in English. as aK ramanujan says, ‘a translator hopes not only to translate a text, but... to translate a non-native reader into a native one.’

In the particular case of texts transported from Indian languages to English, there often is displayed a sheer necessity to anglicise the bouquet of the argot. arguably, this dilutes the flavour

of the culture in focus. Metaphors and sentence structures also vary from language to language.

lakshmi Holmstrom has famously preserved the ‘Tamilness’ of Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight in her English translation by retaining metaphors and not altering linguistic structures of the source language. Her retaining the meta-phor of the ‘tamarind branch’ for ‘a catch’ is an example. This maintains the case for the untranslated and unannotated word and also for two levels of transla-tion: the popular translation as we have known it and an academic translation as is increasingly endeavoured.

The Lost Heroine has likewise con-served the flavour of the original text in Malayalam, with lexis like ‘sayip’, ‘Koche’, ‘Penne’, ‘Edi’, ‘vaidya’ ‘tharavad’, etcetera, with random capitalisation as quoted. and therefore, the references to the ‘por-ridge for supper’, ‘gruel’, ‘boiled asparagus and chilly chutney’, ‘tapioca and fish

curry’ comes across as dissonant. The cultural context of cuisine and its role in placing the protagonist in the intended social band are too precious to let go in translation, especially in a period story.

also, the mother is referred variously as ‘amma’, ‘ammachi’ and addressed once by rosy as ‘Mother’. again, when the upper-caste moral brigade foul-mouths rosy, it’s ‘aruvanichi’ at various places and ‘whore’ and ‘slut’ at others. an editorial consistency would have saved the translation from such glitches.

rosy’s story is one that should be announced to the wide, wide world. Lost Heroine rises finely to this occasion. n

The First Heroine A fictional account of Kerala’s forgotten female Dalit actor of the 1930s By Suneetha Balakrishnan

The LosT heroine Vinu Abraham

Translated from Malayalam by CS Venkiteswaran and Arathy Ashok

Speaking Tiger176 Pages | Rs 299

I l lustration by Saurabh Singh

2 november 202064

books

Alcoholic gangster turns marathon runner; crime reporter turns author; all’s well that ends

well. But that would be a simplistic way of summing up this immensely engag-ing real-life chronicle even though it reads, occasionally, like an inspirational self-help manual.

Mumbai youngster rahul Jadav has a fairly typical suburban, lower-middleclass family background: life ain’t easy, school doesn’t work for him, career options aren’t promising. But he’s smart and growing up in the1990s, an era of gangster wars, he figures better than joining his dad at the razorblade manufacturing unit would be to run errands for mobsters. Whilst earning more money than his parents ever did and partying hard, his disapproving girlfriend dumps him, resulting in booz-ing, the usual drill, until his family is thoroughly fed up and forces him to join a computer course.

Big mistake. as we’re in the early days of digital india, Jadav’s the only gang member tech-literate enough to crack the internet’s potential for cybercrime, which is how he finally strikes gold. simply put, he ferrets out private details of Mumbai’s shiniest—businessmen, real-estate magnates, Bollywoodies… . his don appreciates this breakthrough. extorting crores, the offshore-based don hands down enough cash for booze and bawds, so Jadav spends his youth be-tween a cybercafé and a dance bar. start-ing each day with a fortifying 270ml of whiskey at the bar, Jadav then goes to the cybercafe to threaten people in the name of the don and after work returns to the bar to treat friends to drinks and

buy romantic services from the bar girls by which time he has, unfortunately for himself, drunk so much that he’s impotent.

according to this book, Jadav was involved in an estimated 5 per cent of the shootouts in Mumbai during the first decade of our current millennium. Meanwhile his family is devastated, substance abuse unhinges him, he gets careless and is arrested outside his usual bar, and his complicit friends’ lives are smashed into smithereens. he’s charged under the stringent Maharashtra control of organised crime act, spends years in jail as an undertrial, abandoned by his don, ineligible for bail, tortured by interrogators.

eventually, he sorts himself out (starts learning law, smart boy that he is, in order to argue his own case in court) but only with a view to getting back to gangsterism. letting his family down again and again, his body ultimately collapses and the last option is rehab. in and out for years, relapsing, waking

up in gutters with skull fractures and repenting, life spirals downward until he figures he must either kill himself or totally reboot.

although Jadav appears pigheadedly unsavoury in this semifictionalised tale, one is gripped by the saga of a delusional dude who never stood a chance in the first place. Miraculously, in the end he manages to beat all odds: despite poor health, he takes to running as a substi-tute for drinking, undertaking his own mammoth anti-addiction awareness marathon from gateway of india (Mum-bai) to india gate (Delhi) in 2019.

Fantastic, so far! But i’ve never quite understood why publishers don’t employ editors to read through manuscripts before these are sent to print—gaffes include 0.45mm calibre revolvers and 0.38mm bullets, which made me visualise darts as thin as 1/3-mm piercing perhaps balloons but not hearts. still, i’m not going to complain excessively on this lack of fact-checking since the book is otherwise illuminat-ing regarding the ad hoc functioning of so-called organised crime, their hawala and hafta systems and the arsenals of professional hitmen (who’d probably prefer 0.45-inch-calibre guns to afore-mentioned pinpricks).

i’ve read plenty of putdownable pulp through my life as a lit-crit, but this scur-rilously scandalous ‘how-to-become-a-reformed-gangster’ case study brought me much illicit pleasure. and happily, via the deaddiction centre, Jadav found mental rest—figuratively speaking—on Freud’s sofa. Bottom line being, it is never too late to… uh, well… whatever your excuse is, it’s never too late. n

Shooter to Runner How to become a reformed gangster By Zac O’Yeah

GanGster on the run The True STory of a reformed Criminal

Puja Changoiwala

HarperCollins296 Pages | Rs 399

Rahul Bhiku Jadhav

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www.openthemagazine.com 652 november 2020

Hollywood reporter

Noel de Souza

‘I Love Not Knowing What’s Going to Happen Next and Not Caring’

Ewan McGreGor truly has a penchant for bikes. Back in 2004, in the

TV series Long Way Round he documented his 31,000km journey with friend Charley Boorman from London to new York City. His latest docu-series is Long Way Up where he and Boorman travel on electric Harley-Davidsons 20,000 km through Central and South america.

You’ve done so many of these motorcycle trips. Have you discovered anything new about yourself?I’ve gotten in touch with the wonder in me. I really like it. I love not knowing what’s round the next corner. with this trip it had to be a little bit more organised because we were going on electric motorcycles and therefore at night we had to be somewhere where those bikes were plugged into an electricity source. So in a way that took a little bit of the freedom away. In Long Way Round and Long Way Down (Scotland to Cape Town) most of the time we’d be riding along and if it was four in the afternoon and we got tired we would just say let’s stop here and we would ride off the road, find a place, put our tents up, make some tea and then we would have the rest of the night just kicking around our little camp. and I love that; I love the freedom of that. So there was two things. My friend Charlie had a terrible accident in 2016 and he very, very much damaged his legs so he’s a bit hobble-y now Charlie, he’s totally mobile and everything but he’s less mobile than he used to be. and

then he had a second accident in South africa 2019 where he did some further damage, broke his pelvis, he was really in a very bad shape there. So probably sleeping on the ground isn’t probably very nice for Charlie anymore. That with the electric nature meant we’d a slightly different adventure this time. But I know from doing these trips that I just learned that I just love not really knowing what’s going to happen next and not caring. That’s really nice, it’s a great relief. That meditation on the bike is very soothing . I like long stretches of just sitting on the bike and things bubble up.

Since none of us can travel, we can travel vicariously and enjoy the adventure on our screens.Yeah. I know, we were so lucky to

do the trip when we did. we probably slightly naively decided to leave in September, because it was still brutally winter and cold down there. we got down there to aswan, we were flying in over these snowy mountains and Charlie and I were just looking at each other going, ‘why’s there so much snow?’ (Laughs) and then we were literally snowed in for about four or five days, we had to wait. anyway, that being said, it was just an amazing adventure from start to finish really.

Tell us about your bikes.I’ve got lots of bikes. I mean

most of my bikes are Moto Guzzi, which is my favorite brand from Italy, and I have been a Moto Guzzi rider since I was 20 years old. and so that’s almost 30 years, oh my god! So that’s my favourite bike.

I have a Harley now because, of course, I got a Harley-Davidson after we did this trip, because I really liked working with Harley-Davidson too. and the difference about the electric bikes, it very much lends itself to a trip like this because they are silent and they are very smooth, they are very fast and agile. You ride them very confidently because I think you can really feel the road through the tyres in a way that with the petrol engine is interrupted. I really liked it, I find that we were less tired at the end of the day. and the constant mathematics of how far you have got to go, what speed should we be at, are we going to make it, that to begin with was quite stressful, but in the end it became quite pleasant, I liked all of the figuring it all out. n

Ewan McGregor

66 2 november 2020

RAJEEV MASAND

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

A New BeginningIn August, Sanjay Dutt announced that he was taking time off from work for medical treatment. Neither the actor nor his family revealed details of his condition, but in the days following the announcement, Bollywood sources began to confirm that the 61-year-old actor had been diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer. Subsequently, his wife Maanayata appealed to fans and the media not to speculate about his health.

Not long after, it was reported that while Dutt had begun treatment in Mumbai, he would also complete shooting his pending scenes for both the Ranbir Kapoor dacoit saga Shamshera and the Akshay Kumar-starring Prithviraj Chauhan film.

On October 24th, the actor took to social media to announce that he had beaten the ailment. ‘The last few weeks were very difficult time for my family and me. But like they say, God gives the hardest battles to his strongest soldiers. And today, on the occasion of my kids’ birthday, I am happy to come out victorious from this battle and be able to give them the best gift I can—the health and well-being of our family.’

He further went on to thank his family, his fans and the medical team at Kokilaben Ambani Hospital. Never once mentioning the original diagnosis, Dutt was only sending out the message that the worst was possibly over.

Overseas ActionAmidst speculation that ambitious plans to shoot overseas may have grounded a few productions, Sultan director Ali Abbas Zafar has revealed that he still intends to film his superhero project with Katrina Kaif across foreign and Indian locations. The filmmaker revealed that he’s already locked locations in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and that he is heading on a recce to Poland and Georgia to identify a few more potential shooting sites. He will also film portions in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi. However, the film doesn’t go into production

for at least another year by when it might be safer to roll cameras without the fear of the coronavirus looming over their heads.

War director Siddharth Anand’s rumoured film with Shah Rukh Khan was also meant to be a globetrotting actioner, but sources say the film’s shoot has been pushed till it is safe to travel and roll cameras on overseas shores again. Meanwhile, Vidya Balan resumed shooting her film Sherni with Newton director Amit Masurkar in Madhya Pradesh earlier this week, and Mirzapur director Gurmeet Singh is in pre-production on Phone Bhoot which he is expected to start shooting soon, in India, with Katrina, Siddhant Chaturvedi and Ishaan Khatter.

Hot Right NowLet’s take a moment to appreciate the understated charm and talent of Rasika Dugal, who this weekend pops up in two anticipated streaming shows. In the second season of

Mirzapur, she will return as Bina Tripathi, the sexually dissatisfied wife of Pankaj Tripathi’s mob boss

character Akhanda Tripathi, who was put through the wringer in the finale of the first season. In a shocking twist that no one saw coming, Bina

was sexually abused by her wheelchair-bound father-in-law (played by Kulbhushan

Kharbanda) and then ordered to ‘Bobbit’ her lover Raja, the domestic help who

she’d been sleeping with under the family’s nose.

Meanwhile, in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s classic novel A Suitable Boy, Rasika plays Savita Kapoor, the amiable elder sister of the protagonist Lata Mehra (played by newbie Tanya

Maniktala), whose marriage opens the six-part Netflix mini series. Unlike

her rebellious, romantically confused sibling, Savita dutifully weds the man her mother has chosen for her, gives him a healthy baby within a year of her marriage, and blends nicely into his family. The two characters, and shows, couldn’t be more dissimilar, but Rasika adapts to both worlds comfortably. n